With each successive Mission: Impossible movie, Tom Cruise has made a habit of putting his life in danger for the sake of audience entertainment. This all really began with Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, for which Cruise dangled off the tallest building in the world for a high-flying set piece that made viewers positively nauseous. For Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, he attached himself to the outside of an airplane while it lifted off a runway. And for Mission: Impossible – Fallout, he both dangled below a helicopter and also flew a helicopter himself for the thrilling finale set piece. But for Mission: Impossible 7, he’s outdone himself.
You may recall that set photos revealed Cruise riding a motorcycle up a ramp, flying off a cliff, and then immediately pulling a parachute to safely make his way down to the ground. That is indeed one of the central set pieces of Mission: Impossible 7 (for which Rogue Nation and Fallout filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie returns), and now Cruise is pulling back the curtain on why it’s the most dangerous stunt of his career.
Speaking to Empire, Cruise broke down the challenging logistics of riding a motorcycle off a cliff:
“If the wind was too strong, it would blow me off the ramp,” he explains. “The helicopter [filming the stunt] was a problem, because I didn’t want to be hammering down that ramp at top speed and get hit by a stone. Or if I departed in a weird way, we didn’t know what was going to happen with the bike. I had about six seconds once I departed the ramp to pull the chute and I don’t want to get tangled in the bike. If I do, that’s not going to end well.”
The actor and producer said the pressure was on, largely because he pushed to resume production safely on Mission: Impossible 7 during the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to get people back to work and ensure theaters would be supplied with a big blockbuster to lure folks back to theaters:
“All those emotions were going through my mind,” he says. “I was thinking about the people I work with, and my industry. And for the whole crew to know that we’d started rolling on a movie was just a huge relief. It was very emotional, I gotta tell you.”
This will surely make for a hell of a behind-the-scenes documentary, so here’s hoping McQuarrie and/or Paramount Pictures had someone onhand to chronicle the challenging production of Mission: Impossible 7, which is being shot back-to-back with Mission: Impossible 8. Filming is still ongoing at this moment in time, but McQuarrie and Cruise have a bit more time to put the finishing touches on the first sequel before it hits theaters – M:I 7’s release date was recently delayed to May 27, 2022.