Just Tom Cruise doing Tom Cruise things.
On Sunday, the 62-year-old movie star is expected to perform a high-flying stunt as part of the closing ceremony at the Olympic Games in Paris.
According to various news outlets, Cruise will rappel some 42 metres from the roof of the Stade de France — the country’s largest stadium — a stunt that will unfold as the city of Paris hands the Olympic flag over to Los Angeles, which will host the games in 2028.
“The live broadcast will then reportedly cut to pre-recorded footage of Cruise zipping through the streets of Paris on a motorbike, then on to a plane bound for California, clutching the Olympic flag all the while,” the Guardian reports. “When he arrives stateside, he disembarks the plane by chucking himself out of the window, before skydiving down to the Hollywood sign.”
Absurd. Incredible.
Cruise — who is currently filming the eighth instalment of the “Mission Impossible” franchise in Europe and has been spotted checking out gymnastics and other events at the Olympics this month — has not confirmed these reports. But given the explosive, controversial and star-studded theatrics of the opening ceremony — Céline Dion making an epic return on the Eiffel Tower! French metal band Gojira’s fiery performance at the Conciergerie along the River Seine! — these reports seem both credible and likely.
To mark this special occasion, here’s a look back at five of Cruise’s greatest — and most ridiculous — stunts.
5. Mission Impossible II (2000): The rock climbing stunt
Has any action star looked cooler than Cruise in the legendary opening sequence of “Mission Impossible II,” in which our hero, Ethan Hunt, is out for a leisurely free solo climb during his holiday trip to Dead Horse Point in Utah’s Moab Desert? Wearing brown khaki pants and a sleeveless black tank top, Hunt is shown scaling a cliff thousands of feet from the ground. At one point he slips, catching onto the edge of a rock where he deadhangs with a single hand, before swinging into an “iron cross.” At another point, he leaps some 15 feet onto a small outcropping.
To prepare for the film, Cruise trained with world-class rock climber Earl Wiggins, and insisted on doing all the scene’s key stunts (except for the slip off the overhang, which was done by Cruise’s stunt double Keith Campbell). As legend has hit, Cruise also vetoed director John Woo’s plan to build a replica of the cliff — shot some 2,000 feet above the ground, Cruise was supported only be a thin safety cable that was later removed using CGI.
“I was really mad that he wanted to do it, but I tried to stop him and I couldn’t,” Woo told EW. “I was so scared I was sweating. I couldn’t even watch the monitor when we shot it..”
4. Mission: Impossible — Fallout (2018): The helicopter stunt
Near the end of the sixth instalment of the “Mission Impossible,” Ethan Hunt ends up in Kashmir, for some reason, where he is forced to chase down a group of bad guys fleeing in helicopters. As one of the choppers takes off, Hunt grabs onto a rope connected to a payload, and begins to climb toward the cockpit. Near the top, he slips, but lands on the payload, narrowly surviving. Eventually, he makes it into the cockpit, where he wrests control from the bad guys as the chopper spins wildly through a mountain pass.
Cruise performed the first half of this stunt — dangling from a real helicopter before letting go and landing on a payload — five times (apparently, the cast was not aware that he was wearing a safety harness, and thought he was going to plummet to his death during the first version of the stunt).
But that was also Cruise who was flying the helicopter during the climactic chase scene, including that insane “corkscrew” manoeuvre, which involves turning the chopper into a steep vertical drop paired with a dangerous twist. In order to prepare for that stunt, Cruise spent 16 hours a day training to get his 2,000-hour helicopter pilot license in less than three months of time so that he could fly the Airbus H125 by himself.
Truly a mad man.
3. The Last Samurai (2003): The time Cruise almost lost his head
To prepare for his starring role in “The Last Samurai” — an epic period drama set in the 19th century about an American captain hired by the Emperor of Japan to train the country’s army in modern warfare — Cruise spent a eight months training, for five hours a day, to be able to handle a samurai sword. According to director Ed Zwick, Cruise had to “literally change his body” to gain both the strength and flexibility to handle the film’s action sequences.
As usual, Cruise insisted that he do his own stunts for the film, including a scene that involved riding a mechanical horse and charging toward his co-star Hiroyuki Sanada with swords drawn. Apparently, Sanada’s mechanical horse was meant to stop a split second before he swung his sword at Cruise’s head, but the mechanism failed, nearly costing Cruise his life.
“Tom’s neck was right in front of me, and I tried to stop swinging my sword, but it was hard to control with one hand,” Sanada told reporters while promoting the movie. “The film crew watching from the side all screamed because they thought Tom’s head would fly off.”
2. Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol (2001): The Burj Khalifa stunt
I mean, it was only a matter of time before Cruise decided to pull off a stunt on the world’s tallest building. And it didn’t disappoint.
The scene takes place in the fourth “Mission Impossible” instalment, “Ghost Protocol.” Our hero Ethan Hunt travels to Dubai to hunt down the nuclear launch codes for a weapon that has been stolen by the film’s antagonist. To track down the codes, Hunt decides to scale the exterior of the famous Burj Khalifa, using suction gloves to reach the 2,722-foot skyscraper’s 130th floor. At one point, he literally runs down the side of the building before taking a death defying leap.
To pull off the stunt, the crew built a special harness for Cruise, which required special permits that allowed them to drill into the building’s floor and walls (the crew reportedly broke 35 windows during the shoot). To prepare, the crew also built a wall of glass that simulated the exterior of the Burj, which Cruise used to familiarize himself with the harness and the climb.
The entire thing was a “logistical nightmare,” Screen Rant wrote, but it’s got to be one of the most thrilling stunts in movie history.
1. Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One (2023): The motorcycle off a cliff stunt
The seventh instalment of “Mission Impossible” features Cruise’s most ambitious stunt to date — riding a motorbike off the top of a 1,240 metre-high cliff, then entering a BASE-jump style free fall. It’s a stunt so dangerous that Cruise claims the crew shot on day one of the film shoot to avoid costing the studio extra money if he was injured or killed. “We know either we will continue with the film or we’re not,” he told Entertainment Tonight. “Let’s know day one!”
The stunt, which Cruise said he had wanted to do “since I was a little kid,” was years in the making. According to a video released by the filmmakers, Cruise’s training regiment included 500 skydives and 13,000 motocross jumps over an 80 foot mound.
Risking “serious injury or death,” Cruise, then 60 years old, completed the stunt six times.
Honourable mention: Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
Not to burst your bubble, but no — Cruise and co. were not flying fighter jets in 2022’s sequel to “Top Gun.”
To be clear, the stunts in the film were shot using real jets — almost no CGI was used for the film. And the actors really did fly in those jets, they just weren’t the ones piloting the plane (that was left to real Navy pilots who were borrowed to shoot the film’s aerial sequences.
To prepare the film’s actors, Cruise created a three-month, intensive training program required to deal with the intense G-force and incredibly high speeds of filming a movie in a fighter jet. A legend.
