Tom Cruise Admits His Most Famous Movie Scene Was Barely in the Script

Tom Cruise is revealing how one of the most famous scenes of his career came together and how much of it wasn’t actually planned.

In a 1983 interview with Interview Magazine, Cruise, now 64, looked back on filming Risky Business, revealing that the movie’s unforgettable underwear dance sequence was largely improvised after director Paul Brickman gave him the freedom to make the scene his own.

Speaking with Cameron Crowe, Cruise admitted the role almost never happened because he had been working with Francis Ford Coppola on The Outsiders.

“Francis offered everybody a chance to go on and do Rumble Fish the same week I was offered Risky Business,” the Mission: Impossible actor said. “I thought Paul Brickman was a very bright man with great taste. He knew exactly what the movie was going to be.”

Thankfully, Cruise accepted Brickman’s offer to play Joel Goodsen after a difficult first audition and screen test with Rebecca De Mornay, who had already been cast as Lana.

The trust Cruise and Brickman built by discussing the film in depth paid off once production began, especially while filming what would become one of the movie’s most memorable scenes.

“What he did was he set up the frame of the shot. He showed it to me and said, ‘Let’s really play it and use the whole house,'” he explained. “We had talked earlier and he said, ‘Look, I want Bob Seger‘s “Old Time Rock & Roll” or maybe some Elvis, but if you can come up with something else, great.’ I went through tape after tape. In the end, nothing beat Bob Seger.”

The moment was largely improvised. Cruise grabbed a candlestick, imagined it was an audience and used it as a makeshift guitar while jumping on furniture and sliding across the floor in his socks.

Perhaps most surprising, Cruise revealed, “As we went along, I threw more stuff in. Like the thing with the collar up, jumping on the bed. Originally, it was only one line in the script: ‘Joel dances in underwear through the house.’ We shot it in half a day.”

Though it took only half a day to film, the sequence became one of the most recognizable moments of Cruise’s career and one of the most famous scenes in 1980s cinema.

Risky Business went on to gross $63.5 million domestically and holds a 93 percent critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, where the film is praised for featuring “one of Tom Cruise’s best early performances.”