The movie moment Tom Cruise described as “gruelling”
While Tom Cruise has given a series of impressive dramatic performances throughout his career in the likes of Magnolia, The Color of Money and Eyes Wide Shut, there’s another side to his acting abilities that has afforded him the position of being involved in some of the greatest modern action movies.
It’s common knowledge that Cruise performs his own stunts and absolutely relishes the chance to throw himself into a physical challenge. In movies such as Top Gun, Mission: Impossible and Edge of Tomorrow, Cruise has put his body on the line to deliver a striking air of high-octane authenticity.
However, even the most experience stunt-performing actors can still be faced with a few moments that raise their hairs on end and force them to dig deep into their reserves to find a final bit of strength and one such moment came for Cruise when he starred in the 2017 reboot of The Mummy, directed by Alex Kurtzman.
Cruise played U.S. Army Sergeant Nick Morton who accidentally unearthed the buried ancient Tomb of Egyptian princess Ahmanet, played by Sofia Boutella. Elsewhere, the likes of Annabelle Wallis, Jake Johnson, Courtney B. Vance and Russell Crowe all starred in the film that not only lost around $65-90 million, but also received poor reviews, which led to the cancellation of the Universal Dark Universe.
Still, Cruise himself found some enjoyment from the movie, even if only through his very own way of getting involved in death-defying stunts. The Mummy featured a plane crash sequence for which Cruise had to do 64 takes in zero gravity across a two day filming schedule, even though he had been offered to do the scene on a sound stage.
“I loved it. It’s gruelling. It’s gruelling doing that. When you have the Gs on you and then off of you. A sequence like that, you can’t train for it; you just have to do it,” Cruise once noted in an interview with Extra. Only someone like Cruise would put himself through such a gruelling shoot when offered an easy method just so the audience could see the authentic experience.
Discussing the logistics of the scene, Cruise explained, “It was a really great challenge for the whole crew because we had to build the set inside this aircraft. We had to convince Zero G to allow us to build the set inside the aircraft.” Of course, then Cruise had to convince his less-experienced actors to take on the sequence like Annabelle Wallis.
Cruise told his co-star, “You’re going to love this. You’re going to be able to tell your grandkids one day. You went zero-G.” Whether or not Wallis found the same kind of exhilaration as Cruise in the scene remains to be seen, but director Alex Kurtzmann admitted that there was a lot of “barfing”, even if Wallis noted that Cruise himself was not sick.
The Mission: Impossible and Top Gun actor has been doing stunts for years, so even something like 64 takes in zero gravity, as “gruelling” as it was, was no challenge for the master of stunts. Speaking with Graham Norton, Cruise had once spoken of how much he loves performing his own stunts and how it enables a movie production to “put cameras where you are normally not able to,” only in the instance of The Mummy in was inside a plane falling from the sky.
