As Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One gears up to become the next huge summer blockbuster, Tom Cruise opened up about the news that the actor performed the movie’s wild motorcycle jump on his first day of filming. In a surprisingly candid admission, the actor revealed that he wanted to get the terrifying cliff jump out of the way because not even Tom Cruise knew if Tom Cruise could pull it off.
“Well, we know we’re either going to continue with the film — or we’re not,” Cruise told Entertainment Tonight with a laugh. “Let’s know Day One. I wanna know. What is gonna happen? Do we continue, or is it a major rewrite?”
Jokes aside, the actor used the opportunity to discuss how he’s basically been living his whole life in preparation for the jump:
Preparing for something like that was years, preparing. I’ve been riding motorcycles since I was a little kid, raced cars, and spent a lot of time just with aerobatics, airplanes, helicopters, parachutes. Lot of time with that. But to figure out the kind of thing to do something like that, we’re creating knowledge. We’re creating– it’s our understanding of story, our understanding of camera. How to do something like that. It all kind of came to that moment.
On top of wanting to know if the film’s most crucial scene was going to work, Cruise also didn’t want it hanging over his head during the rest of the production. He already had enough on his plate dealing with COVID shutdowns, so best to just go ahead and jump off a cliff now.
“I was training and I was ready. You have to be razor sharp when you do something like that,” Cruise said. “So it was very important as we were prepping the film that that actually was the first thing because I don’t want to drop that and go shoot other things, and then have my mind somewhere else. Everyone was prepped let’s just get it done.”
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One opens in theaters on July 12.
(Via Entertainment Tonight)