The death-defying stunt pitched to Tom Cruise as a joke: “We’re doing it”
Throughout his career, Tom Cruise has always delighted in performing death-defying acts designed to make audiences gasp and shake their heads in disbelief. This resulted in him almost having his head chopped off while shooting The Last Samurai, flying a fighter jet at 600 miles per hour in Top Gun: Maverick, and training in NASA’s zero gravity ‘vomit comet’ to shoot a plane crash in The Mummy.
However, as anyone familiar with modern blockbuster filmmaking knows, the most enduring showcase for Cruise’s disregard for the laws of gravity – and his own wellbeing – has always been the Mission: Impossible franchise. These insane pictures are constructed around their elaborate action set-pieces, with a vague story threaded in between, and Cruise approaches each movie with a maniacal commitment to topping the previous film’s stunts.
Cruise will often drive the stunts in a Mission: Impossible movie by pushing for something he passionately wants to do. For instance, he always loved the idea of a free solo climbing stunt, so he worked it into the Moab, Utah-set opening of M:I-2. Then, when he first laid eyes on the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building in Dubai, he immediately decided, “I’m going to scale the outside of that sumbitch.” Lo and behold, he did just that in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.
However, one hair-raising stunt in the franchise wasn’t Cruise’s idea at all. In fact, it was first pitched in jest because attempting it sounded more dangerous than anything the franchise had accomplished before. When Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation director Christopher McQuarrie and Cruise found themselves on a runway looking at an enormous A400M aircraft, which was being used in the film’s opening scene, ‘McQ’ – as Cruise affectionately calls him – said something that sounded crazy to everyone in earshot.
“McQ was like, ‘Oh, look at this airplane, how would you like to hang off that airplane?'” a grinning Cruise told Empire in 2025. “I said, ‘Sure!’ He later told me he was joking.”
Either Cruise isn’t programmed to understand humour, or he was too captivated by the potential stunt from the second the words escaped McQuarrie’s lips to realise that the director was having a laugh. Whatever the case, he revealed that the gag soon became a reality and, just as everyone had suspected, it turned out to be the riskiest thing Cruise had ever subjected himself to. So risky, in fact, that he didn’t tell his mother he was doing it.
“So, we set it up,” Cruised explained. “We’re doing it. We had to go through a tremendous amount of engineering to make sure that if anything happened, that the camera wouldn’t come off and hit me and kill me.”
In addition to worries about the camera inadvertently murdering the world’s biggest movie star, the production also had to clean the runway to such a meticulous degree that no particles of dust, debris, or stones could fly up and hit Cruise as the plane took off. The actor also “came up with the idea of using square lenses” to protect his eyes, as that allowed him to keep them open for a close-up. However, the contacts also rendered him virtually blind.
Before cameras rolled on the first take of a stunt they eventually shot a mind-boggling eight times, Cruise told his buddy McQuarrie, who was scared to death that he was about to become the man who killed Tom Cruise, “Listen, man. No matter what, don’t stop. If I look scared, I’m acting. Don’t stop. I’m gonna do this.” And you know what? He did.
