The scene Tom Cruise waited four decades to shoot: “I got to do that six times”
Tom Cruise likes stunts. He likes to keep it quiet, but the signs are all there. The incredibly valuable star has made a recurring habit of flinging himself off very tall things, driving very fast vehicles, and generally trying to get himself maimed for the purposes of our entertainment. The Mission: Impossible franchise alone has seen him take on challenges us mere mortals would wet ourselves just thinking about. He simply isn’t human.
As technology moves on, performers are able to take on bigger and bigger stunts with fewer and fewer risks. Given that Cruise has been in the movie business for over four decades, he knows this more than most. The stuff he’s pulling off now in his 60s are way more elaborate than what he was attempting in his 20s and 30s. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ‘Top Gun’ franchise.
Cruise first stepped into the jumpsuit of Captain Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell in 1986. In 2022, 36 years later, he revisited one of his biggest-ever roles for a brand new story, Top Gun: Maverick. The sequel stepped things up in a major way, injecting some much-needed emotion and character development into the previously vapid world of meathead jocks and cringey one-liners. Miles Teller’s turn as Bradley ‘Rooster’ Bradshaw, son of Mitchell’s deceased friend ‘Goose’, was perfect. His relationship with his pseudo-father figure adds some much-appreciated stakes to the action, and the film is far superior to its predecessor as a result.
Speaking of the action, Cruise was thrilled to be given the opportunity to conquer a task he’d been thinking about for almost 40 years. “One of the first things that didn’t get filmed during Top Gun, the first one, was getting catapulted off of the aircraft carrier,” the star explained on the DVD extras for the sequel (via Showbiz Cheat Sheet). “So I did on this [movie], and I got to do that six times. It’s unbelievable.”
Back in the mid-1980s, there was no way to attach cameras to the fighter planes themselves, as the equipment was too heavy, Fast forward a couple dozen years, and cameras were now light enough to fit inside the cockpit. The actors playing the various pilots had to capture a lot of their footage whilst up in the air, which must have been an absolute nightmare and almost certainly wasn’t what they originally signed on for. It did give Cruise the chance to capture his jet being flung off an aircraft carrier, however, so maybe all that anxiety was worth it.
The action sequences from the first ‘Top Gun’, which was directed by the late Tony Scott, were one of the highlights of the movie. The second picture, which Joseph Kosinski helmed, goes above and beyond, however. Getting to inhabit the cockpit with the characters during the heat of battle increases audience immersion tenfold, especially during the movie’s gripping climax. It’s no wonder that it became the first Cruise-led movie to gross $1billion dollars worldwide. It also, in the eyes of some, helped ‘save cinema’ following the pandemic.
With Cruise showing no signs of slowing down and cinematic technology improving at a rapid canter, who knows what the madman will be able to do next? At this rate, he’ll probably be able to film himself crashing an F-18 at full speed, only to get up and walk away unscratched.
