Tom Cruise has scaled the world’s tallest building, held his breathe underwater for six-and-a-half minutes, climbed a mountain, hung off the side of a plane, and piloted a helicopter during an aerial chase sequence, all for our entertainment. Thank you, Tom. But the next Mission: Impossible will have his “most dangerous” stunt yet.
That’s according to Empire magazine, which spoke to Cruise about the death-defying sequence in M:I 7 — it involves riding a motorcycle off of a cliff, as one does. “If the wind was too strong, it would blow me off the ramp. The helicopter [filming the stunt] was a problem, because I didn’t want to be hammering down that ramp at top speed and get hit by a stone. Or if I departed in a weird way, we didn’t know what was going to happen with the bike,” he said. “I had about six seconds once I departed the ramp to pull the chute and I don’t want to get tangled in the bike. If I do, that’s not going to end well.”
“If I do, that’s not going to end well” is true for most stunts, but especially this one.
Yes, that small dot (in the Getty photo) is Tom Cruise. It took “months” to train for the motorcycle cliff dive (good song title), but the actor was just happy to return to set following a delay due to the pandemic. “All those emotions were going through my mind,” he said (not a reference to his on-set tirade). “I was thinking about the people I work with, and my industry. And for the whole crew to know that we’d started rolling on a movie was just a huge relief. It was very emotional, I gotta tell you.”
Mission: Impossible 7 comes out May 27, 2022.
(Via Empire)