Rob Lowe and Ralph Macchio recently asked whether Tom Cruise really does his own stunts.
On a new episode of Literally! With Rob Lowe, the 61-year-old American actor invited his long-time friend Macchio, with whom he worked in Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, a movie from the early 1980s.
Notably, another actor in the movie was Thomas Mapother IV, who is now known as Cruise.
While having a conversation, both actors remembered that the 62-year-old American actor and film producer was already serious about doing his own stunts more than 40 years ago.
Lowe said, “Whenever I see Tom do these amazing, insane stunts, I look back at when Francis made us, for whatever reason, practice to be gymnasts. Do you remember this?”
Macchio admitted that he did not have to train as much because his character, Johnny Cade, was quiet and kept to himself.
“There was never any pressure on you to do a backflip,” Lowe jokingly added.
“Well, I wasn’t in the rumble. I was in the hospital,” the 63-year-old American actor brought it up.
Lowe went on to share, “That’s what it was. But there was a lot of pressure on us to learn backflips and do all this s***** and I don’t know if you’ve ever learned a standing backflip. It’s hard, it’s scary as s*****.”
“Tom was the only one who did it. And if you watch the movie, the movie’s playing but then the movie just stops and there’s a shot of Tom doing a backflip for no reason and then the movie continues,” the star of The West Wing recalled.
“That’s where it started for him. One hundred percent that’s where it started,” he emphasized.
“He was quite driven from day one. I mean, that gentleman had a plan, he really did. Very distinctly, it was happening there. He has the backflip and he comes up, grabbing the back of his head, because I’m not so sure he stuck the landing, but the car, it was out of frame,” Macchio recounted, applauding Tom Cruise, the Mission Impossible star’s dedication.
