How SNL Missed Out on a Tom Cruise Cameo by ‘Like 8 Seconds’

Despite four decades of stardom, Tom Cruise is one of the few major stars never to have appeared on Saturday Night Live. But he almost did, in December 1999, as former SNL writer Mike Schur explained during a recent tribute to Cruise's Top Gun co-star, Val Kilmer.

Kilmer died on April 1, at age 65, of pneumonia. He had previously battled throat cancer, with which he was diagnosed in 2014.

The Lonely Island & Seth Meyers Podcast dedicated its April 16 episode to Kilmer — star of Tombstone, The Doors and Top Secret, among other films — because Kilmer played the villain, Dieter von Cunth, in 2010's MacGruber, which was directed and co-written by The Lonely Island's Jorma Taccone, who created the MacGruber character for SNL with John Solomon and Will Forte, who played MacGruber.

The podcast featured a call from Mike Schur, whose extensive TV work after SNL included creating Brooklyn Nine-Nine (which starred The Lonely Island's Andy Samberg), as well as The Good Place. Schur recalled a story of the time Kilmer hosted SNL on Dec. 9, 2000.

He said Kilmer was "very intense, but very nice and sort of down for anything." That included a sketch called "Iceman: The Later Years," in which Kilmer played an older version of his Top Gun character, Tom "Iceman" Kazansky — now flying a 727 for a commercial airline. He keeps trying to make the job more exciting than it is, calling everyone dangerous and claiming another commercial flight is a "bogey."

When Tom Cruise Visited Val Kilmer at SNL

To the surprise of everyone, Tom Cruise showed up to watch the live taping at 30 Rockefeller Center, Schur recounted. Longtime SNL producer and talent wrangler Marci Klein brought him in to watch, and Schur watched Cruise watch the "Iceman" sketch.

Also Read: The 13 Best SNL Sketches in the 50 Years of Saturday Night Live

"Marci walked him down, and he was on the floor like standing eight feet away from me, watching this sketch and just enjoying it a great deal," Schur recalled. "And 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?'

"And I was like, 'Yes, of course we should.' And she was like, 'What should he do?' And I was like, 'OK, just tell him, at the end of the sketch' — I remember I told her what the last line of the sketch was — and I was like, 'At the end of the sketch, just have him walk on and grab Val Kilmer and just say, 'Hey Iceman — let's get you out of here, bud, come on,' or something like that.

"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, OK, yeah. I get it. I get it. And I was like, oh my God, this is gonna be incredible," Schur continued.

"And literally, I'm not joking, Tom Cruise took a step toward the set, like heading over to walk on. And the sketch ended, and the applause was cued, and Val got whisked away, and we missed it by, I would say, like eight seconds. We missed a Tom Cruise walk-on into the sketch, which would have just... 30 Rock would have crumbled to the ground.

"Anyway," Schur continued, "RIP, Val Kilmer."

The entire podcast is worth a listen — especially for the section in which Forte describes being roommates with Kilmer for a while after they worked together on MacGruber.