‘The Jennifer Hudson Show’ Spirit Tunnels become an internet sensation
“The Jennifer Hudson” staff pumps up celebrity guests by sending them down the Spirit Tunnel.
Noah Wyle feels a pit in his stomach when he thinks about dancing publicly, but Jennifer Hudson is letting him off the hook.
In a Tuesday appearance on “The Jennifer Hudson Show,” the “Pitt” star, 53, explained why he politely declined to dance down the program’s spirit tunnel. On Hudson’s show, guests are invited to boogie their way down a hallway backstage, dubbed the spirit tunnel, while staffers clap and chant for them. The result is a clip that frequently goes viral on social media.
But Wyle joked that if he were to do the same, “It would have triggered a bigger breakdown than I had on (‘The Pitt’) two weeks ago.”
The “ER” alum told Hudson he doesn’t like to dance in public, and he had a very specific story to explain why: The actor said he swore it off ever since he tried, and failed, to perform the worm at a classmate’s bar mitzvah in 1984.
“I got into some kind of inverted position, and it all collapsed on me, and then I tried to stick it, and I didn’t stick it,” he recalled. “Ever since then, I’ve just opted out of the public dance.”
Wyle noted he has watched Hudson’s show and seen guests gleefully journey down the spirit tunnel, but he quipped that if he did so, the clip would just be of him wincing and saying “no!”
“Nobody needs to see that,” he said. “Thanks for letting me off. Maybe if I come back, I could baby step it.”
Fans did get to see that, though, when the show shared a clip of Wyle jokingly walking down the hallway looking pained and cowering in fear as staffers clapped.
But on a serious note, Hudson told Wyle she wasn’t going to “push” him to partake in the trend and that he should only do so if he feels comfortable, and fans applauded the singer for the consideration.
“I love that you can choose not to do the spirit tunnel,” one Instagram comment said. “It wouldn’t be a (spirit) tunnel if it was forced upon people. I love the respect for (people’s) triggers and comfort zones.”
Stars who have participated in the spirit tunnel trend include Keke Palmer, Lee Jung-jae and Aaron Pierre. Pierre’s dance down the hallway went especially viral, drawing more than three million views on YouTube and more than six million likes on TikTok.
Hudson later joked on the show that the “Mufasa” star’s spirit tunnel clip “was the first time we actually had to turn off the comments on our social media, because it turns out, he was too hot for all y’all to handle.”
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