“Oh, this guy is awesome,” goes a fan who has just seen Tom Cruise perform a mind-boggling stunt. “One has to appreciate his commitment to his job. He wants to provide the perfect shot as well as something really special to the audience.”
The latest film in the Mission Impossible franchise, Rogue Nation, hit theatres worldwide in July. In it, Cruise, all of 53 today, is seen hanging out of an airplane. That scene is real. It wasn’t CGI. It actually happened. Cruise, who’s known to perform his own stunts, has done it yet again.
He’s hung from cliffs. He’s raced cars. He’s been in sword fights, knife fights and shootouts. He’s done it all. Unlike many action stars, Cruise prefers not to use body doubles during these risky shots.
He has faced death several times in his pursuit of these incredible cinematic experiences. In Rogue Nation, he’s strapped to the door of an A400M bomber as the plane takes off at a speed of several hundred kilometres an hour.
While Cruise was wearing safety equipment, it was a truly frightening experience. The fear of getting blown away by the heavy winds was real.
“I couldn’t sleep the night before,” Cruise says, describing the stunt. “If something went wrong, I can’t get into the airplane until we land.”
“I am feeling the force of the wind hitting me. I am actually scared shitless.”
“I knew I wanted to have an airplane sequence. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time,” Cruise said during a promotional interview for the film. “As a kid I remember flying on an airplane and thinking: ‘what would it be like out on the wing or on the side of the airplane?’”
Describing the scene, he says he was hanging before the engine and it was nasty business. “Even when we were taxiing I was also inhaling the fumes and it was going in my eyes,” he says.
Cruise plays the spy Ethan Hunt in the MI films. He’s done some insane stunts in the past, but perhaps nothing comes close to the plane stunt.
In the last MI installment, Ghost Protocol, Cruise was seen suspended from the tallest building in the world, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. The scene required Cruise to swing across the outer wall even as he was getting thrown around by heavy winds.
Going further back, Cruise had a near-death experience during the filming of The Last Samurai. During a fight scene, Cruise was riding a mechanical horse to a sword fight. The machine overshot its journey by a foot, and Cruise came millimetres from being decapitated by his opponent’s sword.
Where will he go from here? In Cruise’s own words: “I always look for a challenge and something that’s different.”
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