No matter how hard you try, you can’t stop Tom Cruise. One of the best actors of his generation, as Tom Cruise has transitioned into the latest stage of his career he’s become increasingly addicted to performing the most death-defying stunts you can possibly conceive of.
Audiences haven’t yet had the chance to see the most dangerous of them all yet, but with the Mission Impossible 7 release date coming down the tracks, they soon will. That stunt is the now-infamous motorcycle-off-a-cliff stunt, seen in the Mission Impossible 7 trailers.
Speaking with Entertainment Tonight about his new movie, the actor reflected on the audacity of his stunt, and how the danger of it meant it had to be filmed on the very first day of shooting. “Well we know either we will continue with the film or we’re not. Let’s know day one!”
The actor explained that if the stunt had gone wrong, the team behind the movie would have had to explain Cruise’s absence through rewrites. “Let us know day one what is going to happen: ‘Do we all continue or is it a major rewrite?’ Really, preparing for something like that [stunt] was years of preparing. I’ve been riding motorcycles since I was a little kid… but to figure out the kind of things [required] to do something like that… I was training and I was ready,” Cruise continued.
“You have to be razor sharp when you’re doing something like that. It was very important as we were prepping the film that it was actually the first thing. I don’t want to drop that and go shoot other things and have my mind somewhere else. Everyone was prepped. Let’s just get it done.”
And get it done he did: audiences across the world will be lining up just to watch the plethora of stunts which Cruise performed himself in the movie, which is one of the most exciting upcoming releases of the whole year.
Early reactions have called the movie another Tom Cruise win, continuing his rich run of form after the enormous success of Top Gun 2 last year. The latest Mission Impossible movie is only part one of two, so there’s plenty more Cruise (and, no doubt, stunts) yet to come.
To prepare for your upcoming mission, check out our guide on how to watch the Mission Impossible movies in order. Or find out our picks for the best movies of all time, before seeing what’s new on Netflix.