Tom Cruise shared a behind-the-scenes look Tuesday at what he calls the “greatest stunt in cinema history” for his upcoming film “Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One.”
The nine-minute-and-twenty-two-second clip opens in Hellesyt, Norway, with a shot the crew filmed in September 2020. Cruise can be heard saying that the stunt is “far and away the most dangerous thing we’ve ever attempted” and that they’ve been working toward it for years. (RELATED: This Dare-Devil Stunt By Tom Cruise Will Make Your Heart Skip A Beat)
So excited to share what we’ve been working on. #MissionImpossible pic.twitter.com/rIyiLzQdMG
— Tom Cruise (@TomCruise) December 19, 2022
“I’ve wanted to do it since I was a little kid,” Cruise, 60, says.
Cruise then rides a motorcycle up a ramp and off a cliff, falling for several seconds before deploying a parachute. To prepare for the stunt, Cruise performed more than 500 skydiving jumps, and more than 13,000 motocross jumps, according to the video.
“Pretty much the biggest stunt in cinema history,” base jumping coach John DeVore says in the video. “Tom Cruise just rode a motorcycle off a cliff six times today.”
“You tell him something, and he just locks it in,” base jumping coach Miles Daisher says of Cruise. “His sense of spatial awareness — he is the most aware person I’ve ever met.”
Director Christopher McQuarrie says the cameras that would “allow us to do what we are trying to do today” did not even exist two years earlier.
“Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One” will hit theaters on July 14, 2023.