Whether he’s hanging out of an airplane or scaling the exterior of a skyscraper, it’s pretty safe to say Tom Cruise’s daring Mission: Impossible stunts take a ton of preparation and planning.
Wade Eastwood, the stunt coordinator on Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, dished on laying the groundwork to pull off some of the actor’s boldest scenes and revealed that Cruise, 62, underwent separate training to condition his body for each individual stunt.
“Tom designs his own training, not stunt training, but the physical training of the diet and so on,” Eastwood told IndieWire in an interview published on Thursday, June 19. “He knows what his body’s going to go through and endure and how he’s moving, and he then gets with his team and he designs that and he will work on things like when we do the speed fly sequence, he designed a system that he could get his core engaged, working with his arms up, so he’s not fatiguing or having injury, because if Tom has an injury then we have to stop shooting.”
Eastwood said that Cruise has “a great team on the physical side” and “on the diet side.”
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He continued, “My job is to make sure that the stunt side, like learning the fights, choreography, the movement for the fights, I’ll get with his physio and his trainer, and say, ‘These are the sorts of movements Tom will be doing.’ And then they know which muscle groups to work on to make sure that we prevent injury.”
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning was released in theaters on May 23 and blew fans away with one of Cruise’s boldest and most dangerous stunts yet. Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt, chases Esai Morales’ Gabriel on top of two biplanes during a nail-biting fight that took months to plan.
Eastwood described what went into the death-defying action sequence and how the crew was able to pull off the stunt as the biplanes flew over the rivers of South Africa.
“It started very early on. We climbed around on a plane on the ground and at an airport in England and started shooting ideas around — Tom, [director Christopher McQuarrie] and myself,” he explained. “And then we strapped it down to the ground and put on some big wind machines and moved around the wing together. And Tom had ideas in his head, but he wanted to feel what the blast was like.”
Tom Cruise © Paramount Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection
Eastwood said that it was important for the team to “know the limitations of that aircraft, because when there’s a body on the wing of the plane, as it moves across the wing, the plane wants to turn in that direction.”
After getting a feel for the wing of the plane and how it moved, Cruise “really felt the blast and he could work out his physical training with his team” as Eastwood began testing the scene with a dummy on the side of the plane.
“There is no other visual effects in the plane sequence,” he said. “It’s 100% real. It might be a little cleanup here, or there, or a little bit of damage on a plane here or there, but the planes are really flying and Tom is really on the wing. And when Tom’s flying, he’s really flying. There’s no trickery rigs, or stage rigs, it’s all in South Africa for real, which was amazing.”
For four decades, Tom Cruise has been working hard on our screens: sprinting across vast landscapes, leaping between rooftops and dodging explosions with the frenetic energy and dazzling grin that have become his trademark. But beyond the death-defying stunts and age-defying bone structure lies an enigmatic figure. Some call him the last true movie star. […]
Cruise’s daredevil reputation precedes him in Hollywood, so much so that former costar Brad Pitt revealed he has one condition to do another movie with Cruise.
“I’m not gonna hang my ass off airplanes and [explicit] like that, so when he does something again that’s on the ground,” Pitt, 61, told E! News at the June 9 premiere of F1.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is out in theaters now.