Tropic Thunder is one of those movies that, you may only really remember because one scene sticks with you. That scene is probably Tom Cruise, bald and overweight, dancing up an absolute storm. The dance sequence has become iconic, which makes it absolutely wild that the scene almost didn’t make it into the movie.
A recent viral Instagram post, which combines different interviews with both Tom Cruise and Tropic Thunder director Ben Stiller, lays out how the dance sequence wasn’t supposed to happen, but then happened anyway. The idea that Cruise’s character Les Grossman should dance was apparently an idea that Cruise had from the outset, but Stiller wasn’t sold as he wasn’t sure how it would fit into the movie. Stiller said…
He always said to me that he felt like the character should dance and I said ‘Okay, that’s cool.’ You know, I didn’t know quite how it would work in the movie because there wasn’t any dancing in the script.
Tom Cruise isn’t used to having people tell him no, this is the guy who fired an insurance company when they wouldn't let him climb a building, after all. It seems Cruise had been taking hip-hop dance classes, simply because it was a thing he didn't know, and so he wanted to use his new skills in a movie.
Cruise would get his chance to make his case for dancing Grossman during a makeup test. The point was to test the makeup that Cruise would wear in the film. The particular makeup test was for makeup that wouldn’t ultimately be used, but Cruise took the opportunity and simply started dancing, in order to show his director how it would look, and Stiller loved it. He explained…
At the makeup test, Tom started doing these moves, and there was no music playing he just started doing this whole dance. I said, ‘Oh, keep doing that, that’s funny.’
We know Tom Cruise as a guy who does his own stunts. While his Tropic Thunder dance scene certainly isn’t his only iconic on-screen dance sequence, as his pantsless Risky Business scene is one of his most famous early scenes, this was a whole different sort of dancing, and there’s no argument that this guy can’t move. Check it out.
It's hard to imagine Tropic Thunder without a dancing Tom Cruise today. It’s not a scene that is necessary in the film as it regards the plot or even the characterization, but that doesn’t make it any less great. And it’s just further evidence that Tom Cruise is a great movie star because he understands what people want from movies, even if we don’t know it ourselves.
There has been the occasional rumor surrounding a return of Les Grossman, but thus far nothing has ever materialized.
