Were you at Janet Jackson’s concert in Charlotte — and if so, did you spot Tom Cruise?
Here’s a mission that may or may not be impossible: figuring out what the biggest movie star on Planet Earth was doing in Charlotte on Friday.
Well, besides attending a Janet Jackson concert.
That’s right — 60-year-old “Top Gun: Maverick” star Tom Cruise was in the crowd for the first show of the outdoor-concert season at PNC Music Pavilion, which on Friday night hosted the second of the two Carolinas stops on Jackson’s “Together Again” 2023 U.S. tour.
After the concert, photos and videos of the celebrity sighting started circulating on social media. Twitter user @DarrellTheDon posted a pair of videos, one of which showed fans taking a selfie with the actor and another showing Cruise waving to fans as he moved toward the exits with a small entourage.
Additional photos shared by @CelebsInCLT (aka Charlotte Paparazzi) overnight showed Cruise posing for more photos with more fans, and sitting in one of the venue’s VIP boxes. The owner of the Charlotte Paparazzi account, which has crowd-sourced celebrity sightings in Charlotte for more than a decade, told The Charlotte Observer that three different independent sources reported seeing Cruise at the show.
Then around dinnertime on Saturday, Janet Jackson herself posted a photo on Twitter of her posing with Cruise against a wall with the caption: “T, it was so good seeing you and nice spending some time together.”
All of this does beg the question: Did he come to Charlotte specifically for the show?
That would be highly unlikely for a number of reasons, not the least of which being it would just be an awfully random place to choose to do so. Jackson (who turns 57 this Tuesday) performed in Madison Square Garden a few nights ago, while next month she’s got a date booked at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. Both of those seem like more-natural places for a Tom Cruise sighting, if he wants to see the concert that badly.
Anyway, for the sake of argument, let’s assume he didn’t come to Charlotte specifically for the show. So then why was he here?
We may never know for sure, though one possibility may be related to his strong ties to the region since 1990, when Cruise was in Charlotte shooting “Days of Thunder” and former a relationship with NASCAR team Hendrick Motorsports and its owner Rick Hendrick.
It’s also worth noting that Jackson’s opening act, Ludacris, is friendly with Cruise. The actor also famously danced to the rapper’s song “Get Back” during the closing credits of the film “Tropic Thunder”; in the 2008 comedy, Cruise played a pudgy, balding, boorish movie studio executive named Les Grossman. Moves from that dance are used in memes to this day.
Whatever Cruise’s excuse for being in town and showing up for some live music was, Friday night’s sighting marks the biggest under-the-radar celebrity appearance at a concert here since Nicole Kidman popped up at Keith Urban’s gig at the same venue last May — although since she’s married to the country singer, that would rate as a far less-surprising occurrence.
And yes, of course, we’re talking about the same Nicole Kidman who is one of Tom Cruise’s ex-wives and the mother of two of his children.
This story was originally published May 13, 2023 at 7:35 AM.
