How many different licenses does Tom Cruise have?
James Bond famously has a licence to kill, but Tom Cruise would probably have one of those, too, if it were legal. The diminutive action star has never met a mode of transport he wasn’t willing to drive, pilot, jump from a great height, strap himself to the outside of, or parachute from, and there are understandably a lot of rules and regulations required to make it happen.
The Mission: Impossible frontman must be an absolute nightmare for insurance companies after deciding that there’s no way he’ll make a blockbuster movie without putting his life on the line at least once. He’s hung off the back of a jet during takeoff, scaled the world’s highest skyscraper, and driven a motorcycle off a cliff in the name of entertaining audiences, making him Hollywood’s ultimate daredevil.
He insists on doing his own driving onscreen, whether it’s a car, bike, boat, or plane, and in order to do that, he needs the requisite paperwork. He even raced for Paul Newman’s team after they worked together on Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money, underlining that there’s almost no high-octane pastime that Cruise isn’t willing to try at least once.
Obviously, he has a driving licence. Being an A-list megastar who’s been perched at the top of the industry ladder for going on 40 years, though, it’s debatable how much driving he actually does himself when he’s not on set, considering the majority of Tinseltown’s biggest names prefer to be chauffeured from location to location rather than getting behind the wheel themselves.
However, that’s merely the tip of the licencing iceberg, and not all of them are vehicular either. Cruise even has a real estate licence to ensure that if he wants to buy or sell a home on a whim, he can simply do it himself instead of drafting in agents and brokers to do the work. Presumably, he doesn’t use that one very often, but the rest of them aren’t gathering dust in his wallet.
Beyond driving and real estate, Cruise also has a license to fly commercial jets, fighter planes, light aircraft, private aircraft, private helicopters, commercial helicopters, and motorcycles, a recreational boating license, a navigational boating license, and a parachuting license that allows him to skydive to his heart’s content. Most people have one, maybe two at a push, but then again, most people aren’t Tom Cruise.
What stunt did Tom Cruise practice for over 13,000 times?
Every one of Cruise’s marquee movie stunts requires incredible practice, regardless of how long it takes. For instance, the climactic airborne chase in Mission: Impossible – Fallout saw Cruise spend his free time accumulating the 2,000 hours of flying required to sit and pass the test that allowed him to do his own helicopter flying.
In the next instalment, Dead Reckoning, he pulled off his most awe-inspiring feat yet by launching himself from the side of a mountain and parachuting to safety. He performed the stunt six times on camera, but it took a lot longer than that to guarantee he’d be able to pull it off to his own exacting standards.
It took months of dedicated planning, with the crew building a track in the English countryside where Cruise could practice to his heart’s content. “That was required because if he was hit with a little turbulent air or the ground failed him in some way, we needed to know he could roll with it,” stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood told Men’s Journal. We probably had him do somewhere around 13,000 jumps throughout the process.”
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning runs for 163 minutes, the motorcycle-to-parachute jump takes up barely any of that time and was enhanced with CGI in post-production, but Cruise went all-in by practicing over 13,000 times for the film’s standout set piece.
…and which stunt did Tom Cruise refuse to do?
Cruise has risked his neck countless times onscreen, so it’s fair to assume there’s no stunt he won’t do. While he’s got no issue with launching himself from a great height or being dangled hundreds of feet in the air, he drew the line at kicking his co-star in the stomach.
Ahead of their fight scene in Dead Reckoning, Pom Klementieff insisted that to make it feel as real as possible, Cruise should boot her right in the midsection. “I kept telling him to just kick me here,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “I said, ‘You can just go for it’. He was like, ‘No, no, no, no’. I was like, ‘But it’s going to help me!’ But he wouldn’t do it.”
He may have refused to kick her, but Cruise left his mark on Klementieff in other ways. As a wrap gift, he paid for her to have skydiving lessons, and not only has she made over 200 jumps of her own, the Mission: Impossible crew nicknamed her ‘Pom Cruise’ for the way she threw herself headlong into her stunts.
