Tom Cruise – he’s just like us.
Speaking in London ahead of the release of “Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One,” Cruise shared that, yes, he feels fear.
“It’s not that I don’t get scared,” the actor said. “It’s that I don’t mind being scared.”
And there ends our delusion.
Cruise, who famously does his own stunts, has put his body on the line time and again for the multibillion-dollar franchise. As superspy Ethan Hunt he’s dangled from the world’s tallest building, clung on to the outside of a plane during take-off, and performed a military-level high altitude, low opening (HALO) skydive no less than 100 times.
In the latest movie Cruise can be seen riding a motorcycle off a cliff before BASE jumping on to … actually, let’s keep this spoiler-free. The stunt was filmed in Norway back in 2020 on the first day of the film’s arduous, Covid-stricken production. It was one thing for Cruise to perform the stunt, quite another to watch, powerless to intervene, said writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, Cruise’s long-term creative partner affectionately known as “McQ.”
“I was just staring at the crosshairs on the screen, and I was waiting to see blue – blue was the color of his parachute,” he recalled. “Once I saw blue, I was just making sure it was a square, because if it wasn’t a square, it meant there was a malfunction. There was no coming back from it.”
Cruise put his director through the experience six times to capture the stunt from all the necessary angles, which looks even more spectacular in the finished movie than the marketing material suggests.
With all that heart-in-mouth action, is McQuarrie still able to have fun? “It’s more fun to finish a ‘Mission Impossible’ movie, for sure,” he said. “It’s a huge relief when it’s all behind you and everybody’s safe.”
“Dead Reckoning” sees “Mission: Impossible” lean into 21st century anxieties in the form of its villain. Dubbed The Entity, this faceless, stateless antagonist is an artificial intelligence capable of infiltrating pretty much any digital network to chaotic ends. (Yes, Tom Cruise hates streaming so much he’s now squaring up to an algorithm.)
The star was reluctant to say much about the AI baddie, but when CNN’s Becky Anderson caught up with the cast and crew in Abu Dhabi – the next stop on the film’s globetrotting promotional tour – McQuarrie was more candid.
“We were talking about it probably in early 2018, as something that even a few years prior would have been an intellectual or an abstract idea,” he explained. “I felt that people were starting to become aware of the way information and information technology was affecting their lives.”
As for AI’s impact on the movie industry itself, McQuarrie was diplomatic. “Like any of the technologies that have been used in previous ‘Mission Impossible’ movies, it’s less about the technology and more about who’s using (it),” he said. “What we’re presenting here is just what happens when the technology potentially falls into the wrong hands.”
Getting the gang back together: Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson and Tom Cruise in the seventh film in the “Mission Impossible” franchise.
Getting the gang back together: Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson and Tom Cruise in the seventh film in the “Mission Impossible” franchise.
