The stunt Tom Cruise was convinced would kill him: “I might impale my skull”
There is nobody in the current movie world who inspires as much discourse as Tom Cruise.
To some, he is the modern messiah of cinema, the man who lifted the medium out of the gutter following the pandemic and champions old-school values as the ‘last real movie star’. To others, he is a borderline creep, with a personal life that screams ‘red flag’ and a penchant for making ego-centric vanity projects that serve nobody but himself.
Regardless of how you feel about the man personally, there is something to be said for the lengths he will go to for his job. Cruise is known for his high-risk stunts, particularly across the Mission: Impossible franchise. He was even awarded a Guinness World Record for his work on The Final Reckoning, an incredibly rare feat for an actor/stuntman in his early 60s.
They may look spectacular on the big screen, but Cruise’s stunts are a real-life minefield. He has injured himself numerous times in the quest for the next big set piece. He broke his ankle while filming a rooftop chase scene for Mission: Impossible – Fallout, the same movie where he had to fall out of a helicopter for one crucial sequence. He actually performed the solo free climbing you see at the start of Mission: Impossible II with no safety net. There was just a harness and a thin wire keeping him from certain doom, and he managed to tear a muscle in his shoulder leaping from one rock to another.
Even though the stunts have become increasingly dangerous as the series has progressed, danger has been present from the very start. Speaking to Edith Bowman at a special event at the British Film Institute, Cruise recalled a particularly harrowing experience on the set of the first Mission: Impossible movie.
“ I remember the scene where I got blown from the helicopter to the train,” he remembered. “There were pipes from the camera rig sticking out, and I was like: ‘Guys, I might impale my skull’. No one had thought about stuff like that.”
The scene in question takes place right at the end of the film. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is clinging to a helicopter while in pursuit of his former mentor-turned-nemesis Jim Phelps (Jon Voight). Hunt destroys the chopper and is blown onto a nearby train. He hangs on for dear life as the baddies perish in the flames.
This was the first time Cruise had worked as a producer on a film, so he had a lot more influence on how this scene was handled. “I was constantly working and developing my abilities and developing technology,” he revealed. “ It was such early days that the harnesses that I was wearing were very new and the cables were very new and we were all experimenting.” It’s a good thing he was, too, otherwise his most famous franchise might have ended before it had even begun.
The helicopter-train scene is still one of the most famous in the series, even if the physics behind it is a little dubious. You wouldn’t be able to tell from watching it that Cruise was inches away from death at one point, but knowing that now just adds to the drama.
