9/30/2026

Tom Cruise at the "Digger" US Premiere held at Directors Village on September 28, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. Michael Buckner/Variety

Tom Cruise dug out some of his classic early career dance moves on his visit to the Jennifer Hudson Show on Wednesday (Sept. 30). The Oscar-nominated movie icon even brought along his signature Ray-Ban sunglasses for an enthusiastic shuffle down the show’s iconic Spirit Tunnel.

Dressed all in black, Cruise spun, bopped and kicked his way down the carpet, pulling several staffers in to dance with him as the crew sang a Risky Business homage to the Digger star cued to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock & Roll,” but with Cruise-centric lyrics.

“We’ve got Tom Cruise at the Happy Place. He’s in the tunnel walking to the stage,” the crew sang to Cruise, as they matched his vibe with their own black shades during the actor’s first visit to the syndicated show. “He’s a legend everybody knows. We’ve got that Tom Cruise rock ‘n’ roll.”

Cruise is out and about promoting the environmental apocalypse drama Digger, due out on Friday (Oct. 2) and directed by Oscar-winner Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant). In it, Cruise disappears behind makeup and prosthetics into the role of Texas oilman Digger Rockwell, whose company sparks an ecological disaster that could end in nuclear apocalypse.

While some critics have said the film might finally win Cruise his first competitive Oscar, others have savaged it, including the Boston Globe, which gave it a brutal 0-out-of-4 rating, calling it the “worst movie” of his career, as well as The Hollywood Reporter, which said it was “a climate crisis satire so smug and bombastic it makes Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up seem almost innocuous.” The New York Post dubbed it Cruise’s “first real stinker in nearly 10 years,” predicting that audiences will “want to leave after the first five minutes,” while Deadline said it was a “return to the kind of adventurous films in cinema’s groundbreaking” 1970s era, and “the kind of movie we don’t see often on this scale.”

Sitting down with Hudson for the full hour, Cruise talked about meeting Prince William as a child on the set of Mission: Impossible and reuniting with William and Princess Kate at the recent London Digger premiere and also teased Top Gun 3.

Cruise’s long-walk promotion of the film began in July when he brought his signature high-energy spirit to the 2026 FIFA World Cup final in pregame pump-up speech at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium before the gripping match between champions Spain and Argentina. Most recently it brought him to the Kansas City Chiefs’ season opener, where he hung out and yukked it up with Taylor Swift, who he said “schooled” him on football, while calling the singer a “genius.

Digger‘s cast also includes Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, Jesse Plemons, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg and Emma D’Arcy.

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