A riddle: which comes first, the Tom Cruise movie or the Tom Cruise stunt?
In a statement that’s both a bit odd and typical of Tom Cruise, the 60-year-old actor opens up on a behind-the-scenes video Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One saying he’s wanted to do what they want to perform “since I was a little kid”. Namely, the film’s biggest and most dangerous stunt – a motorcycle jump off a Norwegian cliff, then crash into a BASE jump.
After blinking enough times for tiny Tommy Cruise to imagine death-defying jumps for fun, he realizes the impressive scope of the stunt when Cruise, dead reckoning Writer and director Christopher McQuarrie and her sophisticated stunt team detail the intense prep work involved in the stunt. “Prep work,” in this context, requires a truly surprising number of skydives by Cruise — including some jumps he does “just to warm up” when it’s finally time to film the big stunt.
A consummate movie star, Tom Cruise approaches film promotion with clinical efficiency, flashes his megawatt smile and talks about how great it is to entertain us, the viewers, because films are simply the best. He’s about as good at that as he is at not talking about Scientology (that is: extreme), but 21st-century Tom is also a low-key Tom, here to take a job and do it well.
Not so here: Tom Cruise did so much fun prepare for this stunt and look like it this is what he really wants to do with his career: not make movies, but dream up crazy stunts and then use his considerable power and influence in Hollywood to have him spend a few months doing those stunts. In return he gives the money people a movie I guess. (His director gets mild panic attacks every time he jumps out of a plane.)
Jumping out of planes is so much Tom Cruise’s love language that he decided to use it to thank fans for their support Top Gun: Maverick, casually disembarking from a plane thousands of feet above South Africa as he dizzily talks into the camera about how entertaining we all are “the glory of our lives”.
If there is a god, one day Tom Cruise will piss them off.
