Breadcrumb Trail
Actor Trained for a Year for His Most Death-Defying Stunt Yet in the ‘Mission: Impossible’ Movies
By Mark Daniell
Published Jul 11, 2023 • Last updated 2 days ago • 5 minute read
NEW YORK CITY —
After Tom Cruise dangled off the Burj Khalifa, clung to the side of a plane and performed a dangerous HALO jump stunt — all as part of his ongoing Mission: Impossible series — the action star didn’t have to think long about what was going to come next.
He wanted to try a motorcycle jump off the face of a cliff 1,200-feet above sea level before opening his parachute just 500-feet from the ground where he would then speed fly the rest of the way down. Cruise, 61, rehearsed for a year before performing the stunt off Norway’s Helsetkopen mountain on the first day of principle filming on Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, which opens in theatres today.
On the day he shot the stunt, he had a lot on his mind. “I was thinking about opening my chute at the last possible moment. I was thinking about the cameras on the edge of the cliff. I’m hoping I’m not going to get blown off the ramp by the helicopter. I’m hoping I don’t tumble. There was a lot of things going on with the performance,” Cruise said breaking into a smile Monday night at the New York premiere of Dead Reckoning. “There was a lot going on that day.”
The jaw-dropping manoeuvre was declared by Cruise’s Mission castmates on the winding red carpet as the series’ best. It was a sequence he first started thinking about as a child, in love with the movies. So he wanted to get it out of the way when filming on the sequel started in September 2020.
“I trained very hard,” Cruise told Postmedia of taking on something so daunting on the first day of production. “I don’t want that hanging over my head. I trained, so let’s get it done … let’s get it over with.”
But it’s not just a death-defying motorcycle jump. Cruise races through the streets of Rome in a tiny Fiat (while handcuffed to co-star Hayley Atwell), fights atop a speeding train, and speed flies down a mountainside. “They were all challenging in their own way,” McQuarrie says of Dead Reckoning’s edge-of-your-seat thrills. “The desert sequence was extremely difficult, creating that sandstorm. The airport scene had so many logistical challenges since we were at the height of the pandemic. Drifting in Rome on those cobblestone streets gave the car a mind of its own.” McQuarrie and his production team also crash a full-size train in the film’s gasp-inducing finale. “The train sequence was probably the most complicated one we’ve ever shot,” he said.
Esai Morales and Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance. Photo by Paramount Pictures and Skydance /Paramount Pictures and Skydance
Then there was the pandemic. Dead Reckoning was the first Hollywood blockbuster to go before cameras in the fall of 2020 as Cruise and his producing partners tried to restart the filmmaking industry. “There was a tremendous amount of pressure and I kept saying, ‘This is going to work. We’re going to do this.’ You just have to take everything else out and just be present and be in the moment,” Cruise said.
Cruise’s return this week as Impossible Mission Force agent Ethan Hunt in Dead Reckoning finds him and his team of spies — which includes Rebecca Ferguson, Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg — going after a world-ending artificial intelligence threat known as the Entity. His pursuit brings him into conflict with old adversaries played by newcomer Esai Morales and franchise vets Henry Czerny and Vanessa Kirby. Along the way, Hunt finds himself allied with a fast-talking pickpocket (played by Atwell).
McQuarrie, who has enjoyed a creative partnership with Cruise that dates back to 2008 when they worked on the Hitler assassination thriller Valkyrie together, said he knew right after the last Mission that his next story would need to be split into two.
“I knew from Fallout, which was nearly two-and-a-half hours, that we had a bigger movie this time. So I said, ‘Let’s give ourselves the space by making a two-part movie.’ The action was there, but I wanted to spend more time with the characters.”
Tom Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie on the set of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Photo by Paramount Pictures and Skydance /Paramount Pictures and Skydance
The Mission: Impossible series is now entering its 27th year after the 1996 original, which was directed by Brian De Palma. McQuarrie credit’s the franchise’s enduring popularity to Cruise’s commitment to finding new ways to thrill moviegoers.
”That’s all down to Tom. He’s all about entertaining the audience. He’s all about big-screen emotional shared experience. We take things from all the movies we’ve previously done, whether it’s movies we’ve done together or separately, and we just put it into the next thing and we’re all in.”
Cruise said he hasn’t tired of the series because he and McQuarrie —