Steve Carell turns Northwestern commencement address into a dance party
By Alli Rosenbloom, CNN
(CNN) — Leave it to Steve Carell to turn a commencement speech into a dance party.
While speaking at Northwestern’s 2025 commencement ceremony over the weekend, the “Office” star asked everyone to rise before breaking into what he called “the mid-commencement address dance break,” according to a clip of the moment posted to social media.
Carell then began to dance with the Dean of the School of Communication and Annenberg University Professor E. Patrick Johnson, according to the Chicago Tribune, while “That’s Not My Name” by the Ting Tings played in the background.
Carell then ran off the stage and into the sea of dancing graduates, running down the aisles showing off his dance moves and throwing up high-fives.
“That was as invigorating as it was disturbing,” he joked, breathlessly, once he got back up to the podium. “Wow, am I out of shape.”
Carell is not a Northwestern graduate but he does have Chicago roots, having performed with the city’s famed Second City comedy troupe after he graduated from Denison University in Ohio.
While Carell added plenty of levity to his address during the dance break, he also touched on the realities that students and graduates today are facing.
“It’s difficult for me to process just how much you’ve all experienced in your young lives. I feel your anxiety and your fears about the world around you and it’s heartbreaking to me,” Carell said, according to a clip of his speech provided to CNN by Northwestern University. “You have already had to overcome a lifetime’s worth of turmoil and uncertainty and it doesn’t seem fair.”
Carell went on to encourage the graduates to “remember the little things, like being kind and that you’re not alone.”
“Take care of one another,” he said.
Carell currently stars in the Netflix reboot of “The Four Seasons” and HBO’s “Mountainhead” series. (HBO, like CNN, is a property of Warner Bros. Discovery.)
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