Tom Cruise Missed His First-Ever ‘SNL’ Appearance By 8 Seconds
Tom Cruise has performed death-defying stunts, danced around in his underwear and defiled at least one talk show host’s couch, but he’s somehow never been on Saturday Night Live.
Even though Cruise has been a massive star for more than four decades, he hasn’t hosted, or even made so much as a brief cameo in the long-running sketch series. Cruise did once show up in a “Celebrity Jeopardy” sketch, but only in the form of host Ben Stiller.
SNL’s lack of Cruise content hasn’t been for lack of trying. In Live From New York: An Uncensored History Of Saturday Night Live talent coordinator Marci Klein admitted that “in terms of desirable hosts, we of course always want to get Tom Cruise. I’m always trying to get him.”
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Well, it turns out that Cruise came extremely close to making a surprise appearance on the show, but missed his chance by a matter of seconds.
On the most recent episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast, the hosts and guest Will Forte shared their memories of MacGruber’s own Val Kilmer, who passed away earlier this month. They also played a voicemail from Parks and Recreation co-creator Michael Schur, who recounted a story from his Saturday Night Live writing days involving Kilmer and his Top-Gun co-star.
When Kilmer hosted SNL in 2000, “Robert Carlock had a great idea for a sketch: It was like (15) years after the events of Top Gun and Iceman had retired from the Navy and was now flying very boring commercial flights for Delta,” Schur explained. “And so I wrote it with him, and (Chris) Parnell played the pilot and Iceman was the co-pilot.”
In “Top Gun: The Later Years,” Iceman’s co-workers don’t really care for his mistaken claims about bogeys, nor do they take him up on his invitations to participate in homoerotic volleyball competitions.
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When Schur went to watch the sketch being performed during the show, he was shocked to see that Maverick himself had popped by to support his friend. “Tom Cruise came to the show, and Marci walked him down, and he was on the floor standing eight feet away from me watching this sketch and just enjoying it a great deal.”
Then Klein had an idea. “Marci came over to me while the sketch was airing and was like, ‘Tom Cruise is here, should we get him to, like, walk-on?’” Schur recalled. “And I was like, ‘Yes, of course we should!’” So he told her the final line of the sketch, and instructed her to ask Cruise to enter the scene and say, “Hey Iceman, let’s get you outta here, bud.”
And according to Schur, Cruise was into the idea. “So she went over to him and she was whispering into his ear on the floor, and I saw Tom Cruise nodding. I remember very clearly he was nodding, like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah, I get it, I get it.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is gonna be incredible.’”
Unfortunately, this seems to be the one instance in SNL’s history when a sketch didn’t run too long. “Literally, I’m not joking, Tom Cruise took a step toward the set… heading over to walk on, and the sketch ended and the applause was queued and Val got whisked away to run do a change. We missed it by like, I would say, eight seconds,” Schur lamented, adding that if the Cruise walk-on had happened “30 Rock would have crumbled to the ground.”
Too bad Cruise wasn’t eight seconds too late to make The Mummy instead.
