Matt Damon describes Tom Cruises’ extraordinary approach to stunt work
Tom Cruise and Matt Damon are two of Hollywood’s biggest male stars, yet they have surprisingly never worked together. Still, they have both found great individual success as action heroes, with Cruise starring in the Mission Impossible franchise and Damon leading the Bourne franchise. Subsequently, the pair of Hollywood giants have bonded over their roles as action stars whilst enjoying downtime away from filming.
During the shooting of 2014’s The Edge of Tomorrow, Cruise and Emily Blunt went for dinner with Damon, who was also in London. Damon used this as the perfect opportunity to question Cruise about shooting stunts, which the actor has been known to carry out himself. For example, in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, the fourth instalment in the series, Cruise decided to perform a perilous stunt all on his own. The scene required him to use suction gloves to scale the Burj Khalifa, a 2,722-foot skyscraper. The actor took climbing the world’s tallest building in his stride and readily harnessed himself to the structure.
This stunt remains one of the most impressive feats in action cinema, made all the more astounding by the fact that no stunt double was used at all. Since then, Cruise has continued to perform risky stunts, proving that he will do whatever it takes to achieve the perfect shot. Talking to Conan O’Brien, Damon expressed that despite his action-hero status, he is terrified of heights. When he asked Cruise to explain his approach to shooting such an ambitious stunt, he told the actor, “I’ve been dreaming of this shot for 15 years, of this sequence, and finally, I had a chance to do it.”
Damon explained, imitating Cruise, “I go to the safety guy. […] The safety guy says, ‘You can’t do that because that’s too dangerous,’ and I’m like, ‘Uh-huh uh-huh.'” Damon then revealed that Cruise’s fix to being advised against performing a stunt was to fire the safety guy and hire another one. By doing so, Cruise was able to perform one of the many stunts that led him to become known as Hollywood’s biggest daredevil.
As the years have passed, Cruise has continued to perform his own stunts, such as the aerial sequences in 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick. According to the film’s aerial stunt coordinator, Kevin LaRosa II (via GQ), “We had what I like to call rules on Top Gun: Maverick as far as aerials were concerned. And the first and foremost rule – it all had to be real.” In the scene, Cruise flew the plane at an impressive 600 miles an hour whilst keeping it below 50 feet. At this rate, it seems as though Cruise will continue performing his stunts for as long as he keeps acting.
Watch the full clip of Damon below.
