For the young cast being brought in to work with the likes of Jerry Bruckheimer, Christopher McQuarrie, and of course Tom Cruise on Top Gun: Maverick, the pressure must have felt equivalent to Mach 10. But Cruise – who is always too cool for school, even if it’s Navy Fighter Weapons School – had some simple words of advice for the young recruits.
Glen Powell spoke to People magazine about working with Cruise, who has a motto; Pressure is a Privilege. “Tom said this phrase, ‘pressure’s a privilege.’ When there’s [an] expectation on something, it also means there’s a lot of opportunity.”
The pressure was especially intense when it came to the beach football scene; “Talking to Rick Rossovich or Val Kilmer, they didn’t know [the volleyball scene in the first movie] was going to be as iconic as it was. But for us on this, we knew that everybody would be waiting for that scene. And I thank God they did that early on in the movie because then we could actually have tequila and enjoy life a little bit, rather than starve and eat protein all day long.”
Powell continues to sing Cruise’s praises; “You just never know if someone’s going to continue being in your life after you wrap a movie, it’s just sort of hit or miss,” Powell says. “I’ve just been grateful [for] how Tom has been so involved in my career and how he checks in to make sure the changing of my life is going well and to see what I’m working on next and if I need any help with it. He’s just such a special friend. I’m just so grateful that he’s as cool, if not cooler, than you would hope he’d be. On this movie, I really got to learn from the greats.”
Powell says, “When you have a movie the size of Top Gun, there’s a lot of expectations on how you play a certain character. You don’t want to be a derivative. You don’t want to be stuck in the ’80s. You’re trying to figure out a way to update things. When you have that amount of expectations, there are a lot of ways to miss. There are a lot of ways to fail.” Thankfully, Top Gun: Maverick being the highest-grossing movies of 2022.
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