Tom Cruise has set the stunt bar high with each film in the Mission Impossible franchise.
But these impressive acts carried real-world risks. The megastar gave an example of his stunt in the second installment, climbing a mountain in Moab, Utah.
He told Empire magazine that he had a broken foot, and he never told anyone. “Some of these injuries, what’s the point?” he recalled. “I wanted to do a climbing sequence.”
The Top Gun star continued, “Now we’re into the winter months in Moab, I’ve flown all the way from Australia, and there are gale force winds. So we can’t even have my crew up on the mountain.”
“I have pushed the studio for the opening of this movie, and you can’t even get there to set up the camera,” the actor recounted his efforts to let the studio agree to his vision of the film’s opening shot.
“I am so exhausted from jet lag, and I don’t know how to call the studio, and I’m not shooting, and you feel the pressure of shooting something, and for six months they’ve been wanting me to change the opening sequence,” the 62-year-old noted.
Despite this, Tom said, “And what happened is, I remember waking up the next day, and I was just like, ‘You have to confront this.’ And the sun was coming up, and the wind was gone, and the temperatures had come up. So I was like, ‘Let’s get to the top of the mountain and just start shooting it now.'”
But the pressure was ramping up as Tom started to free climb the mountain himself. “This is back in the days where you didn’t have radios, and I’m free climbing as I’m going up to where I need to be for that opening shot.”
“I had to pace myself, because I had to climb down afterwards, and if I fall, there’s a cable that’s going to get me, but I’m going to be slamming up against the mountain,” the Academy-nominated actor said.
He remembered, “And the rock is very soft rock. At certain times you’re going, ‘Jesus, I’m sliding, it’s breaking away.’ As I’m doing the Iron Cross (a move where he is suspended between two pieces of rock).”
“I’m actually hanging there, but it isn’t quite right, and you can see it. I was like, ‘Just tell me this is the shot, because I can’t do it again.’
And what made this stunt even difficult, Tom said, was his injury. “What people don’t know is that there’s a section where I’m jumping high to low, but my foot was broken. And I never mentioned it to anyone. Some of these injuries, what’s the point? You just keep going.”
“So I’m jumping, and my foot wasn’t right. John Woo [director] was like, ‘We’ve got the shot.’ I was like, ‘No, we want it in one shot, I gotta keep doing it.’ And that’s the shot that’s in the movie. But it was so much fun working with John, doing that sequence, because I knew it was our [marketing] campaign,” Tom concluded.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning will be out on May 23.
