15 Popular Actors Who Sneak Into Movie Theaters

It's one thing for an actor to make a movie, to trust in the script and their fellow actors, to believe in the director, and to trust in their own performance. It's another thing to see the finished film with an audience at a premiere; it must be easy to get in your head about it, to fear that everyone's only clapping out of politeness because they know you're in the room. How can you know if the movie is any good? At a certain point, isn't everyone just telling you what they think you want to hear?

Plenty of actors have found a way to solve this problem, and that's to truly see their work through the eyes of the audience. The solution, it seems, is to become an audience member yourself, to sneak into the theater unnoticed and to watch how everyone around you is watching your movie. Are they laughing at all the right times? Are they sighing contentedly when you act out a romance? Are they applauding when you show up on screen, even though they don't know you're sitting behind them?

The actors on this list have gone public with the fact that they've gone incognito. Some were caught at the time, but plenty of others were able to save it for a talk show anecdote. Read on to learn which famous people might just be sitting next to you the next time you go to the movies.

Picture this: you've got your large popcorn and a concoction from the Coca-Cola freestyle machine. You've got your ticket and your favorite reserved seat, all thanks to your AMC A-List subscription. You're settled in and already munching on your snacks, silently mouthing the words to the Nicole Kidman ad along with her, when someone sits down next to you. It's a guy in a low baseball cap, and you know you're there to watch the last "Mission: Impossible" movie so you've got Tom Cruise on the brain, but ... could that be him right there next to you, about to watch his movie in your local theater?

It sounds farfetched, but apparently that's a somewhat regular occurrence. Cruise is a big advocate of the act of going to the theater to watch movies with a crowd, and it's something he partakes in himself despite being one of the most famous men on the planet. During a panel at Cannes, Vulture reported that Cruise told the crowd he sees everything that comes out in theaters. "I put on my cap and I sit in the audience," he said plainly. Put a different way: he goes to that place for magic, because we need that, all of us.

Michael B. Jordan first worked with Ryan Coogler on "Fruitvale Station," a fantastic film that won him serious accolades. They linked up again for "Creed," yet another great movie that made people realize Jordan is an excellent actor. Re-teaming for "Black Panther" probably seemed like a no-brainer, but this time, Jordan would be playing the villain, and that would be new.

He trusted Coogler, but still, Jordan wanted to see for himself how audiences were responding. Thankfully, he told Entertainment Tonight that sneaking into a theater was a great experience, reporting, "The gasps, the one-liners, everything was working ... They were really engaging and interacting with the film, so it was good to see." As for whether audiences were accepting him as a villain, Jordan said the exercise eased his mind. "It is a little relaxing to know that people are really liking the performance," he said. "It was something I'd never really done before, so I was anxious to kind of see how it played and if it worked. It felt good."

Actors sneaking into movie theaters is actually a time-honored tradition, and we have to imagine that it's easier if an actor's career hasn't necessarily taken off yet. All the way back in 1977, before "Star Wars" was the entertainment industry juggernaut we know and love today, Mark Hamill wasn't yet a massive star. That made it easier for him and Carrie Fisher to sneak into a screening not even of "Star Wars," but of a different movie entirely, hoping to merely see the "Star Wars" trailer.

At first, the person at the ticket booth had to consult a manager. Ultimately, the employees helped Hamill and Fisher peek into the theater while audiences watched the "Star Wars" trailer for the first time. "We went in and we watched it, and it was so early they didn't have John Williams' score," Hamill later told a panel at Disney's Star Wars Celebration (via YouTube). "They didn't have very many special effects finished at all ... It made a real impression on me because we hadn't seen any of the footage."

The audience wasn't impressed, though; people heckled the trailer. "We both laughed," Hamill said, "but after we laughed we kinda went, 'Uh oh.'" They, of course, needn't have worried; nowadays, there is so much "Star Wars" out there.

Carrie Fisher, it turns out, was a lifelong sneaker. She's the one who convinced Mark Hamill to duck into a movie theater and see their "Star Wars" trailer together, able to slip into the crowd unnoticed because they both weren't superstars yet. Decades later, however, Fisher had become one of the most recognizable actors in all of geekdom when she tried to sneak into a Comic-Con theater that was showing a preview of "Scream Queens."

The Fox show starred her daughter, Billie Lourd, who also popped up in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." As Lourd revealed to The Hollywood Reporter, they'd tried to see that movie together in disguise, but they were spotted by fans immediately. That didn't stop Fisher from trying to get into "Scream Queens" anyway. "She showed up with mismatched socks and hadn't brushed her hair," Lourd recalled. The unusual look didn't help. "Even then," Lourd said, "everyone was like, 'There's Carrie Fisher!'"

We lost Fisher before "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker," but Lourd played Leia in a flashback scene, honoring her mother's biggest contribution to pop culture.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, plenty of people speculated that celebrities must be enjoying their newfound privacy. After all, just about everyone in Los Angeles was wearing masks every time they stepped out in public, and it's hard to recognize an actor in their normal-person clothes anyway, even when they don't have half their face covered.

Jack Quaid took advantage of masking when he snuck into a screening of "Scream," the 2022 requel that found the star of "The Boys" playing a horror movie-obsessed fanboy whose girlfriend is being stalked by a Ghostface-masked killer. The franchise is one of the most beloved properties in all of horror, so Quaid wanted to see how audiences would respond to the newest incarnation of the series. He donned a black face mask, a beanie, and a hoodie, and no one knew that they were watching the new slasher next to one of its stars.

Quaid later posted a selfie to Instagram, giving up the disguise. "I snuck in," he wrote in the caption. "Big [thumbs up emoji] to everyone seeing @screammovies this weekend," he continued, adding a tribute to original "Scream" director Wes Craven.

In 2021, Andrew Garfield reprised his version of Spider-Man in "Spider-Man: No Way Home," a multiverse movie that brought Tom Holland's web-slinging superhero into contact with previous movie versions of the character, including the ones played by Garfield and his predecessor, Tobey Maguire. They tried to keep the appearances as secret as possible, not wanting fans to know that the old Spideys would be back until the moment they finally appeared on screen.

To that end, Garfield couldn't tap into the excitement that surrounded the film's release until it was actually out. That's when he and Maguire snuck into a theater together to see how fans reacted to the surprise roles. "I snuck into a theater on opening night," he confessed to Entertainment Tonight, "with my baseball cap on and my mask ... No one knew we were there. So much fun, and yeah, it was just a really beautiful thing to share together."

Though Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire seem to have had a great time sneaking into "Spider-Man: No Way Home," they're not the only actors who wanted to see how audiences reacted to their surprise appearance in that movie. Charlie Cox, too, had a small role in the film, bringing back Daredevil from the ill-fated Netflix show of the same name. He pops up in the film as his alter-ego, Matt Murdock, a lawyer who offers to help Tom Holland's panic-stricken Peter Parker.

Cox confessed to Radio Times, "I snuck into a movie theater near where I live and literally stood in the corridor ... and, sadly, my experience was it was dead f**king quiet! I was so disappointed." He'd brought his wife along to help cheer for him, but instead, it was just awkward. "She was recording me, because it'd be fun to have that moment of everyone cheering, and then ... tumbleweed!"

The COVID-19 pandemic threw the entertainment industry into chaos; even as restrictions loosened, could studios trust that audiences would return to sitting in large rooms together with hundreds of other people for hours at a time? Hoping to head off some of the lost viewership, Warner Bros. announced that they'd premiere their entire 2021 slate on HBO Max and in theaters, planning to let people choose whether to see new releases at home or in cinemas.

"Mortal Kombat" was one such film that hit the internet the same day it was released, but that didn't stop star Lewis Tan from checking it out with everyone else who braved the crowds. He played Cole, the martial artist who gets drawn into the titular tournament, and he suggested on X that people see the movie repeatedly to pick up on everything they'd done. "[S]nuck into a theater last night to feel the energy and it was booming," he said, "and sold out."

Superhero movies tend to have pretty engaged audiences; who can forget the way everyone audibly sounded around them as "Avengers: Endgame" took the MCU to a record-shattering box office peak? It makes sense, then, that superhero actors are the ones who primarily want to have that happy-audience experience for themselves, and "Superman" star David Corenswet is no different.

After the James Gunn movie was released to positive word-of-mouth, kicking off the new DC Universe, Corenswet confessed on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" that he'd crept into a Philadelphia-area movie theater without being spotted. He brought some friends along, joking, "I bought us all the Groucho Marx glasses with the nose and the mustache." He said he felt self-conscious at the premiere, but seeing it this way was better. "You forget that they're all strangers!" the actor continued. "They're laughing at your jokes and they're cheering you when you succeed!"

There are plenty of cameos in "Barbie," the 2023 smash hit that featured appearances by stars as varied as John Cena, Dua Lipa, and "Saltburn" director Emerald Fennell. The whole movie was directed by Greta Gerwig, but she initially made her career as an actor, too. Though she still acts in films such as "White Noise," which her husband, Noah Baumbach, directed, Gerwig declined to give herself a cameo in "Barbie."

Instead, she made some real-life cameos, sneaking into multiple theaters to see what people were thinking of her film. Delighted by people laughing at certain super-specific jokes, Gerwig also viewed the opportunity as a quality control effort. "I went around to different theaters and sort of stood in the back," she told one BFI panel (via The Hollywood Reporter), "and would then also turn up the volume if I felt it wasn't playing at the perfect level." Greta Gerwig: actor, writer, director, and audio technician.

"Barbie" was infamously released on the very same day as "Oppenheimer," and together, Barbenheimer made history with explosive opening weekend box office numbers. That means there's a good chance that at the very same time Greta Gerwig was lurking in theaters and checking sound levels, Emily Blunt was peeking in on audiences watching her turn in "Oppenheimer."

Blunt played Kitty Oppenheimer, the wife of Cillian Murphy's titular character, in the Christopher Nolan biopic. Speaking with Anne Hathaway for Variety, Blunt recalled the unease around the film's promotion thanks to the then-ongoing strikes that had brought Hollywood to a halt. "I realized that 'Oppenheimer' was going to be a very significant moment in cinema history," she said, when she and her husband John Krasinski caught a showing at a Nyack, New York, shopping mall. They spotted a group of teenagers dressed like the movie's main character, a scientist from the 1940s. "I got chills," she said. "I called Cillian afterwards and said, 'You're not going to believe what I just saw.'"

It's hard to make any movie, but it's especially hard to get audiences on your side if you're doing something people don't do very often. That was the dilemma faced by director Paul Feig and the cast of his movie "Bridesmaids," a groundbreaking 2011 comedy that focuses on women in ways they don't usually get focused on in comedies. It's a bawdy, breathtakingly honest film full of more bodily fluids than you can imagine.

Melissa McCarthy, who wound up with an Oscar nomination for her role, told Howard Stern that she was over Feig's house the night the movie came out, and they decided to go see for themselves whether audiences would show up for a female-driven comedy like theirs. "[We] just stood in the aisle and like, listened to people laughing," she recalled. "We were like, we're not crazy ... best feeling ... we knew it was funny."

When "Dune: Part Two" was released in 2024, Josh Brolin promoted the sci-fi epic with a hosting gig on "Saturday Night Live." At a press conference for the show, he told reporters from NBC New York that he'd taken advantage of being in the city for rehearsals and had snuck into a showing of the film at the famed Lincoln Center.

Brolin was happy to find New Yorkers loving his movie. "I stayed for two hours," he said, ultimately ducking out early because of work. He added, "It was amazing, people were locked in, they were so into it." Given all of the upheaval that the entertainment industry had endured in the preceding few years, Brolin was particularly delighted to see people having a communal experience together. "The theater experience when I was a kid was everything," he said. "It's the whole reason why I got into this, and now it feels like it's back."

Sometimes, celebrities who sneak into movie theaters discover that they're more famous than they realized ... or maybe just more physically imposing. That's the dilemma faced by "Euphoria" star Jacob Elordi, an Australian actor who wanted to see his movie "Saltburn" with a crowd. The controversial film found him playing a super-rich, super-attractive, aristocratic college student who draws the adoration of a con artist named Oliver (Barry Keoghan), and Elordi wanted to see what audiences thought of the provocative movie.

"I snuck in, which is kind of hard to do when you're my size," Elordi revealed on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon." He is, after all, reportedly 6'5". "It was the middle of summer and I wore this obnoxious leather jacket with patches all over it," he said, certain he'd successfully gone unnoticed. He soon realized he was mistaken. "My dad sent me this," he said. Fallon held up an Aussie newspaper clipping, which bore the front-page headline, "Hollywood Star Goes Incognito At Qld Cinema." So much for that!

If there's one thing to know about pop superstar Lady Gaga's acting career, it's that she's committed. After all, the woman once asked Kirsten Dunst and other more established stars if they ever felt drunk when drinking prop drinks. (No, it seems they do not; that's just Gaga.)

Gaga's first major role was in the 2018 remake of "A Star Is Born," one of the best movie musicals of all time. Gaga played a singer named Ally who finds worldwide fame as her mentor, and later husband, Jackson Maine's (Bradley Cooper) career declines. It's the movie that gave us the smash hit "Shallow," but it's also a very sad movie, as Gaga was reminded when she snuck into a theater to watch people watch it. Ultimately, it became too much for her. "I had to remove myself," she told Variety, confessing to leaving before she sang the final note. "The film moves me so deeply. I feel so entrenched in the character that the second half of the film — without revealing what happens — is so emotional and tragic," she explained. "I have to take myself out of it."