Tom Cruise dances in Spirit Tunnel
Tom Cruise stepped out of the dressing room at Warner Bros.’ Studio 1 on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026, and walked straight into a hallway already packed with The Jennifer Hudson Show staff. They lined both walls in black sunglasses. They were singing.
The track was a remix of Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band’s 1978 song “Old Time Rock & Roll,” the lyrics rewritten for the man who had just opened the door. “We’ve got Tom Cruise at the Happy Place. He’s in the tunnel walking to the stage. He’s a legend everybody knows. We’ve got that Tom Cruise rock and roll,” the crew sang.
He had entered the Spirit Tunnel, the show’s live pre-show hallway segment at Studio 1, where staff gather before each episode, line the corridor, and sing a customized welcome as the guest walks toward the stage. The sunglasses matched across the line.
Jennifer Hudson had booked him at the 2026 World Cup final. They crossed paths there by chance in the summer, and she made the pitch on the spot. “I was like, ‘Tom, could you imagine your Spirit Tunnel? What do you think they’re going to sing for you?’” Hudson told Variety.
“I watch the show, Jennifer,” Cruise replied. “I watch everything. I watched you on American Idol.” He already knew the segment.
Cruise put on his own black Ray-Ban-style sunglasses. Dressed all in black—pants and a button-down by one account, jeans by another—he spun, bopped, and kicked his way down the carpet. He pulled several staffers off the wall to dance with him, backtracked the hallway multiple times, and took the full run without hurry, some of his hand claps landing off the beat.
The number and the shades were a direct homage to 1983’s Risky Business. In that film, written and directed by Paul Brickman, Cruise played Joel Goodsen, a high-school senior on Chicago’s North Shore left alone while his parents vacationed. One sequence has Goodsen dancing through the living room in underwear, a shirt, and black sunglasses to Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band’s original 1978 “Old Time Rock & Roll.” Risky Business opened in August 1983, grossed more than $63 million, and became Cruise’s breakthrough role, earning him his first Golden Globe nomination. The Studio 1 remix used the same song; the sunglasses matched the ones from the scene.
At the end of the tunnel he threw a hand-heart. “Thank you guys,” he said.
Cruise was at Studio 1 for Digger, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, a two-time Academy Award winner whose earlier work includes Birdman and The Revenant. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a Texas oil baron and tycoon whose company causes an ecological disaster that could trigger nuclear war. For Rockwell he wore prosthetics, a fat suit, and thinning white hair, and he used a Southern accent. The cast includes Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, Jesse Plemons, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Emma D’Arcy.
He sat down with Hudson next and joked about the tunnel. In the interview that followed, reported by Hayley Santaflorentina, he spoke about the faces that had met him backstage and what the attention still meant. “First of all, it's a beautiful thing to be able to walk into a room and people smile. Even backstage when I was talking to everyone here, they're saying, ‘I like this movie,’ and then say, ‘I like this movie.’ It is a really beautiful thing.”
He kept the work itself at the center. “Because I want to create—I like all kinds of music and movies and to be able to play in those arenas and share that with people. And so, it really opens those doors to humanity, in a way.” The contact he preferred was direct. “I like being in there. Don't send me emails. We're going to sit down. We're going to communicate like face to face.” Fame, he said, is “an absolute privilege and responsibility... It's very beautiful.”
The film’s first public screenings were only days away. The Spirit Tunnel clip took a same-week afterlife across the entertainment desks: Lara Spencer included the moment in Good Morning America’s Pop News roundup, reported by Rachel Stone; Angelique Jackson wrote the Studio 1 visit; Gil Kaufman covered the stop; Jaelani Turner-Williams filed the Complex piece; and Alyssa Ray tracked the hallway footage after The Jennifer Hudson Show posted the video online and the clip moved through the day’s roundups.
Digger opens in theaters Friday, Oct. 2, 2026.