Well known for doing his own death-defying stunts, particularly in the Mission: Impossible franchise, Tom Cruise attracts a mixture of admiration and disbelief from fellow screen stars for his daredevil antics.
Speaking last year, for example, a gobsmacked Matt Damon recalled talking to Cruise about one of the actor’s most iconic M:I stunts: when he scaled the outside of Dubai’s 2,700ft-tall Burj Khalifa skyscraper.
Recounting his conversation with Cruise, Damon revealed that the 62-year-old only got the go-ahead to film the spectacular action sequence after replacing a safety advisor who told him it was “too dangerous”.
“So I got a new safety guy”
“There are the Tom Cruises of this world who do their own stunts, like literally hang off a plane,” Damon told audience members in Madison, Wisconsin, during a live show of the Smartless podcast.
“I remember I had dinner with [Cruise] once and it was after he did the one where he ran around the building [in 2011’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol]. And I go, ‘Can you tell me how that happened?’
“I mean, he’s a really intense guy. He’s like, ‘Yeah, I’ll tell you how it happened. I’d been thinking about this shot for 15 years.’
“He goes, ‘So I go to the safety guy and I lay it all out. The safety guy goes, “We can’t do that. It’s too dangerous, you can’t do that.” So I get a new safety guy.’”
Damon went on: “That’s the beginning of [Cruise’s] story, and I just go like, ‘Stop. That’s where we’re different. When the safety guy says, “No,” I’m like, “Safety guy says it’s not a good idea,” you know?’”
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“Inspiring to watch”
This year, Cruise appeared as M:I lead character Ethan Hunt for the eighth and seemingly final time, in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.
Since first playing Hunt in 1996, the New York native’s daring M:I feats have also included jumping out of a plane, dangling from the bottom of helicopter and driving a motorbike off a cliff.
Such stunts led two-time Best Actor winner Sean Penn to praise Cruise as “an extraordinarily committed craftsman” in a recent interview on the Louis Theroux Podcast. “He’s probably the best stuntman in the movie world,” Penn added.
Speaking at a ScreenRant event shortly before The Final Reckoning’s release in May, Cruise’s M:I co-star Simon Pegg agreed that the actor’s commitment to performing perilous action shots is “inspiring to watch”.
In a later interview with People, Pegg also looked back on Cruise’s Burj Khalifa sequence. “[I remember] just leaning out of the window,” the British actor said, “and seeing Tom sort of hanging there, smiling, this big s**t eating grin on his face, like, ‘I’m having the best time.’”
“[Cruise] literally will risk his life for the audience,” Pegg concluded, adding: “I’ve said, ‘You’re absolutely nuts’ many times to him. But he just cares that much about it.”
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