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Daniel Radcliffe was once concerned about performing in front of Tom Cruise’s ex-wife Katie Holmes. If only because Radcliffe noticed Holmes in the audience while he was mocking Cruise in the middle of a play.

Daniel Radcliffe once starred in the Broadway play ‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying’

Daniel Radcliffe posing at the 'Weird Al' premiere.
Daniel Radcliffe | Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images

In 2011, Radcliffe starred in the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The play was an updated version of the 1967 musical of the same name. Radcliffe found himself starring as a window cleaner attempting to move his way up in the world in the prestigious adaptation.

The young actor was cast in the role by Robert Ashford, who told Radcliffe he needed to sing and dance in the play. Although he was familiar with singing in plays thanks to starring in Equus, dancing was a new area for him.

“I was going: ‘O.K., yeah, I’ll do dance lessons, fine. But you are swimming against the tide here, Mr. Ashford,'” Radcliffe recalled in an interview with The New York Times.

Radcliffe felt that others might find it odd for the Harry Potter star to be a part of the musical. But seeing as Radcliffe was looking to further expand his career, the star welcomed the change.

“I think to a lot of people it’s a slightly confusing choice, but I like that,” he added.

Daniel Radcliffe had an awkward encounter with Katie Holmes after mocking Tom Cruise

In 2005, superstar Tom Cruise made headlines in an Oprah interview after enthusiastically jumping on the media mogul’s couch. Radcliffe and Ashford ended up spoofing the incident in How to Succeed. Radcliffe was happy to see most in the audience registered the Cruise joke.

“We had an intelligent audience in tonight. They got the Tom Cruise reference,” Radcliffe once said according to Indian Express.

But there was one incident where Cruise’s ex-wife at the time, Katie Holmes, was in attendance to watch the play. Holmes’ presence, and the audience’s reaction to Radcliffe’s Cruise spoof, made for a very uncomfortable experience.

“I got very, very paranoid that night because she was in the audience and I did it and the audience reaction wasn’t nearly as much as it normally is and I was like, ‘Oh man, they all know she’s here’ and they’re like, ‘Wow, this is really awkward,'” he once said in an interview with Access. “But it was good.”

Tom Cruise allegedly told Seth Rogen that he was set up during the Oprah interview

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Cruise once allegedly asserted the incident that once generated so many headlines and spoofs might have all been planned to make him look bad. In Rogen’s memoir Yearbook (via Insider), the comic actor claimed he had a meeting with Cruise about the film Knocked Up. Cruise would soon address the Oprah moment during the meeting, opening up about his own theories behind the matter.

“‘They edited it to make it look so much worse than it was,'” Rogen recalled Cruise telling him. “‘They do that all the time. You should see what they do to my friend Louis Farrakhan!'”

The meeting left a memorable impression on Rogen.

“Of all the strange sentences I’ve heard in my life, this one coming out of Tom Cruise’s mouth is in the top three,” he added.