He showed us how he made the mission possible.
Tom Cruise revealed his “most dangerous stunt” ever in a behind-the-scenes feature for his upcoming film, “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” in a clip posted Wednesday on Twitter.
Days after posting a video jumping out of a plane, the “Top Gun” actor shared a 9-and-half-minute-long clip showing him driving a motorcycle off of a cliff.
“This is far and away the most dangerous thing we’ve ever attempted,” said the 60-year-old actor. “We’re going to shoot it in Norway and it will be a motorcycle jump off a cliff into a base jump.”
According to Cruise, he has wanted to engage in the risky business since a young age.
Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote and directed the film, said that Cruise, who insists on doing all his own stunt work, put everything from the plan to the stunt team together.
Stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood revealed that Cruise went through “a year of base training, advanced sky-dive training, a lot of canopy skills, a lot of tracking.”
Base jumping coach Miles Daisher described Cruise as an “amazing individual.”
“You tell him something, and he just locks it in,” Daisher added. “His sense of spatial awareness, he’s the most aware person I’ve ever met.”
“I have to get so good at this that there’s just no way that I miss my marks,” joked Cruise.
The “Jerry Maguire” star said that he did 30 jumps a day to perfect every aspect of the stunt. The video said that he has performed over 13,000 in total.
“Coming up with the stunt is only one of the technical challenges,” said McQuarrie. “The other is putting a camera in place that you can see where Tom is doing it.”
“Finding the right lens, the right platform, the right medium. Even two years ago, the cameras didn’t exist that would allow us to do what we are trying to do today,” McQuarrie added.
Cruise explained that the key to getting the shot is consistency as well as hitting the right speed.
“We have to be able to consistently predict where Tom will be in three-dimensional space,” McQuarrie noted.
According to the video, Cruise performed the stunt six times a day.
“This is far and away the most dangerous stunt we have ever attempted,” McQuarrie said. “The only thing that scares me more is what we have planned for ‘Mission 8.’”
Cruise recently wished his fans happy holidays and thanked them for their support — and then jumped out of a helicopter.
“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” is set to be released in theaters on July 13, 2023.