The movie that let Tom Cruise fulfil a childhood fantasy: “Realising his dream”
If there’s one thing Tom Cruise is known for, it’s performing his own stunts. Well, that and being short… and the whole Scientology thing. Maybe he’s more complicated than we give him credit for.
Anyway, the Top Gun star has put himself in an insane amount of peril for our entertainment. Some critics argue that his approach is unnecessary and dangerous, but there’s an undeniable satisfaction in knowing he’s actually doing these stunts for real.
The franchise that has allowed Cruise to indulge in his passion for adrenaline is ‘Mission: Impossible’. Ever since he first stepped into the role of Ethan Hunt back in 1996, the star has done all sorts of things that even a professional stunt performer would think twice about. He’s scaled the world’s tallest building, flown a helicopter at high speed, clung to the side of a plane, and free-climbed a massive rock face, a stunt so scary Cruise has admitted he would never do it again.
The daring deed that most resonated with IMF’s finest happened in the series’ seventh instalment, Dead Reckoning – Part One. Although, now that the eighth film is going to be called ‘The Final Reckoning’, we can probably drop the ‘Part One’ subtitle. According to Hayley Atwell, who appears in the movie as quick-witted thief Grace, confirmed to The Guardian that the movie had allowed Cruise to tick something off his bucket list.
Atwell, best known for her role as Peggy Carter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, revealed that a lot of improvising went down on the Dead Reckoning set. “When I auditioned, they were clear they were looking for someone who likes to work in this way,” she recalled. “That it’s not for everyone.”
However, there was one thing that was pencilled in from the start. “There’ll be Tom going: ‘From five years old I’ve always wanted to jump from a cliff on a motorbike’, and realising his dream,” she said. “But with the rest, they’re kind of making it up as they go.”
The scene in question sees Hunt driving his trusty motorcycle over the edge of a cliff, deploying a parachute, and then landing on the top of a train. The stunt was filmed in Norway on day one of production so the scriptwriters could come up with a plan B in case, to put it bluntly, Cruise was injured or killed. Some extraordinary behind-the-scenes footage reveals the mad scale of the endeavour. He had to become an expert in both base jumping and motocross riding, training and drilling for hours and hours every day to nail the precise aspects of both disciplines.
This was Atwell’s first time working with Cruise, and she had nothing but nice things to say about him. “When I started, I was very aware of the rarefied air around him and how there is no one like him,” she said. “He is a one-man studio and, to me, very kind, very professional. And because of that, I felt I was able to try lots of different things. There was never a risk of failure or being unsafe. Tom really likes people to thrive on set.”
With the release of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning on the horizon and the series set to continue long into the future, Cruise has plenty of opportunities left to fulfil even more of his boyhood dreams.
