Tom Cruise denies likening making blockbusters to serving in Afghanistan

No picnic ... Tom Cruise. Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images

Tom Cruise has been forced to deny accusations that he likened working on blockbuster movies to serving a tour in Afghanistan.

In publicly-released court papers for a case the actor has brought against Life & Style and In Touch magazines, Cruise's comments about the reasons behind not having contact with Suri for extended periods during the shooting of thriller Edge of Tomorrow aka All You Need Is Kill, has aroused widespread criticism.

Cruise gave a deposition to lawyers as part of his case against the magazines for defamation, after they ran stories in 2012 alleging he had "abandoned" his daughter Suri after divorcing his wife Katie Holmes.

After being questioned about his counsel's public assertion that the long periods Cruise did not see his daughter was analogous to soldiers' separation from their families, Cruise replied: "That's what it feels like, and certainly on this last movie [Edge of Tomorrow], it was brutal. It was brutal."

Cruise's lawyer Bert Fields, who was present at the deposition, responded by releasing a statement saying that Cruise's quotes were taken out of context.

Fields said: "The assertions that Tom Cruise likened making a movie to being at war in Afghanistan is a gross distortion of the record... What Tom said, laughingly, was that sometimes, 'That's what it feels like.'"

The publicly released transcript appears to be incomplete, and breaks just after Cruise's comment. Fields says an unreleased video of the deposition shows that Cruise was not being serious about the comparison. "As the video shows, he and the lawyer were laughing at his answer, and, when asked in the next question if the situations were comparable, Tom said, 'Oh, come on,' meaning of course not."

Elsewhere in the deposition Cruise admits that Scientology "was one of the assertions" in the reasons for his divorce from Holmes, and that Suri is no longer a member of the Church of Scientology.