A Guide to Tom Cruise's Legendary Stunt Work

It’s a bird, it’s a plane…it’s Tom Cruise! The beloved actor is one of the last truly bankable action stars in Hollywood, and it’s not just because of his boyish features and charming grin. It’s also because he’s willing—nay, eager—to do his own stunts in a world where practical effects are going the way of the dodo.

Plenty of other actors do some of their own stunts—Keanu Reeves in the John Wick movies, for example—but few of them take the practice to the literal heights that Cruise does. For 2011’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, he hung off the side of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, and in 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, he flew his own P-51 Mustang for Maverick’s sky-high date with Jennifer Connelly’s character, Penny.

Cruise’s fans (and critics) are naturally curious about why he throws himself into these potentially dangerous situations when he could just let the professional stunt guys do it, but Cruise himself seems baffled as to why people don’t understand his danger-seeking behavior. “No one asked Gene Kelly, ‘Why do you dance? Why do you do your own dancing?’” Cruise told The Hollywood Reporter in May 2022.

Well, true, but Gene Kelly never had to hold his breath underwater for six-and-a-half minutes while doing his own dancing. Keep reading for a deep dive into Cruise’s history of doing his own stunts.

??When did Tom Cruise start doing his own stunts?

Cruise has said that he first developed an interest in stunt-like work when he was just 4 years old. “I had this doll, and you throw it up in the air and a parachute comes down. I played with this thing, and I’d throw it off a tree, and I was like, ‘I really want to do this,’” he recalled during a panel discussion at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. “I remember taking the sheets off my bed, and I would tie a rope ... and I climbed up to the eave, and I got up to the roof. I looked and my mother was in the kitchen—she had four kids—and I jumped off the roof.”

Cruise has been starring in action films since the late 1980s and early 1990s—the original Top Gun, Days of Thunder—but his reputation for doing his own stunts began with 1996’s Mission: Impossible. For that movie, Cruise famously did his own work in the scene where his character, Ethan Hunt, breaks into a government vault from above while suspended on cables from the ceiling.

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Why does Tom Cruise do his own stunts?

In the first Mission: Impossible film, one of Cruise’s stunts came about by happenstance. For the moment where a giant fish tank explodes, director Brian De Palma initially had a stuntman perform the scene, but he thought it didn’t look convincing. De Palma asked Cruise to do it instead, despite the risk of him drowning or getting injured by flying glass. Cruise agreed, and that’s the take you see in the film.

Cruise later explained that his childhood interest in daredevilry continued into adulthood, and performing his own stunts allowed him to explore those passions further. During a 2014 appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Cruise explained that he “always loved fast cars, motorcycles, hiking and climbing,” so he likes having the chance to do those things in his movies as well.

In the same interview, Cruise explained that he also likes to do his own stunts because it makes for better storytelling. “I feel that [when acting] you’re bringing everything, you know, physically and emotionally, to a character in a story,” he told Norton. “I’ve trained for 30 years doing [stunts] and it allows us to put cameras where you are normally not able to.”

What stunts did Tom Cruise do in Top Gun: Maverick?

Cruise and his co-stars weren’t allowed to fly F-18 fighter jets themselves for Top Gun: Maverick, but they rode along in the back seat as real Navy pilots flew the planes. Cruise being Cruise, though, he still managed to do some of his own stunt work.

The F-18 cockpit scene

While Cruise wasn’t piloting the jet in the flight scenes, he was seated in the plane, experiencing the same G-forces as the naval aviator in front (the pilot was edited out in post-production). Cruise helped put together a flight school syllabus for the cast based on his own experience as a pilot.

“Tom had personally designed a training regimen that would basically condense two years of flight training into three months—and it was all done in a way that Tom had wished he’d had for himself on the original Top Gun,” Lewis Pullman told The Ringer in May 2022. “We would do these little surveys after each flight. You write down how many G’s you pulled, what maneuvers you did, what challenges you may have had.” Pullman said that he and his castmates originally thought no one was even looking at the surveys, but he later realized that Cruise was reading them.

“Whenever we saw Tom, he would come up to us and say, ‘Hey, man, I saw that on your last flight you had a little trouble pulling zero G’s. Here’s what I do,’” Pullman recalled. “It was like, ‘Holy smokes, Tom Cruise is taking the time out of his jam-packed day to give me personal tips.’”

Flying his own plane

For the scene where Maverick takes Penny (Jennifer Connelly) on a date, Cruise flew his own vintage P-51 Mustang, a model that was originally used in World War II and the Korean War. “It was an extraordinary experience,” Connelly told Good Morning America of the scene in May 2022. “We were flying, skimming the top of the mountains, and there was a jet right off our wing that was filming us, so it was definitely flying unlike any flying I’ve done before.”

What stunts has Tom Cruise done in the Mission: Impossible movies?

Cruise has done tons of stunts in the Mission: Impossible franchise over the years—including riding a motorcycle and running from an exploding fish tank—but here are some of the more notable examples.

The vault heist

The famous death drop in 1996’s Mission: Impossible is one of the earliest examples of Cruise doing his own stunts. In the scene, Ethan Hunt descended from the ceiling on cables but could never touch the ground in the vault he was robbing. “I remember we were running out of time and I went down to the floor and I kept hitting my face,” Cruise recalled in 2021 for the film’s 25th anniversary.

He eventually came up with the solution to put pound coins in his shoes—and that helped him keep his balance. “I was holding it, holding, holding it, holding it, and I'm sweating, and I'm sweating, and [director Brian De Palma] just keeps rolling,” Cruise said. “And I just hear him off-camera, and he’s got a very distinct laugh. I can just hear him start to howl, and he goes, ‘Alright, cut.’”

Taking a knife to the eye

For the infamous scene in 2000’s Mission: Impossible 2 where Ethan Hunt nearly takes a knife to the eye, Cruise insisted that a real knife be used for the scene—and that its wielder stop it just a quarter inch from his eyeball.

Bouldering in Utah

For the opening rock-climbing scene of Mission: Impossible 2, Cruise got into position via winches and was secured with cables and harnesses that were later edited out of the film. A stunt double performed the scene where Ethan dangles one-handed off a cliff, but Cruise really jumped 15 feet from one side of the mountain to the other.

The Burj Khalifa climb

In 2011’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Cruise really did hang off the world’s tallest building, but he was fully strapped in with a harness that was edited out of the film’s final cut. The harness was so tight that it could have cut off his circulation, though, so he had to complete the scene very quickly.

The plane hang

This stunt is probably second only to the Burj Khalifa climb in terms of fame. For 2015’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Cruise hung on the outside of a plane as it took off, and yes, he really did it. As with some of his previous stunts, he was in a full-body harness that was bolted to the inside of the plane. He also wore special contacts that protected his eyes from any flying debris (which was necessary as the plane ascended to an altitude of 5,000 feet).

Holding his breath underwater

Also in Rogue Nation, Cruise held his breath for a full six-and-a-half minutes underwater. (As a reminder, most humans can do it for about 30 seconds before needing air.)

Cruise trained with experts to learn how to slow his heart rate so he would require less oxygen. “There’d be times I’d be sitting there in meetings and I wouldn’t breathe,” he recalled during a 2016 episode of The Graham Norton Show. “I realized I am not breathing, and I had to turn my autonomic system back on to breathe again.”

The helicopter chase

In 2018’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Cruise dangled from a rope hanging from a helicopter flying above New Zealand. The crew rigged up a pulley system to protect Cruise, but there was still enormous danger involved.

“The only thing the safety line was ensuring was that if Tom was killed during the stunt, we wouldn’t be looking for his body in the bushes,” director Christopher McQuarrie told the Los Angeles Times in 2018. “Because if he made the fall at the wrong angle, it’s picture wrap on Mr. Cruise. If he hits the payload headfirst as opposed to back first or legs first, he’ll break his neck and just be a rag doll.”

The HALO jump

After breaking his ankle doing a different stunt in Fallout (jumping between buildings), Cruise performed a HALO—high altitude, low open—jump. Cruise had to complete more than 100 skydives before he qualified to perform the one seen in the movie. The crew also had to develop a special helmet that would provide oxygen to Cruise while also clearly showing his face for the camera.

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What other stunts has Tom Cruise done?

Cruise isn’t just a daredevil for Mission: Impossible — he also gets the death-defying job done on his other films.

Free falling in The Mummy

The Mummy, released in 2017, failed to launch Universal’s planned Dark Universe franchise, but it still squeaked out a memorable Cruise stunt. In one scene, Cruise’s character, Nick Morton, found himself inside a crashing cargo plane. Cruise was offered the chance to shoot the scene on a soundstage, but he declined, instead filming inside a zero-gravity plane used by NASA to train astronauts. The scene ended up requiring more than 64 takes. “There was a lot of barfing,” director Alex Kurtzman told Variety in 2017. (Cruise’s costar Annabelle Wallis, however, noted that Cruise was not one of the barfers.)

Suiting Up in Edge of Tomorrow

For 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow, Cruise wore exosuits that weighed between 85 and 130 pounds. The weight even got to Cruise, a veteran of executing wild feats on film. “I’m having to sprint in it,” Cruise explained to USA Today in 2013. “It’s physically grueling.”

Flying a hover pack in Minority Report

During one scene in 2002’s Minority Report, Cruise jumped onto the back of a foe escaping with a hover pack. “Absolutely, it’s Tom Cruise doing a lot of that stuff,” stuntman Randy Butcher told Vulture in 2015. “The wirework takes some nerve to do, but [it’s] relatively very safe to do. Things to do go wrong—if anything ever jammed, they’d have to get him down from there. There has to be a safety team ready to come off the rooftop to transfer whoever’s in trouble to the rescuer and lower [him] to the ground.”

Sword fighting in The Last Samurai

Cruise learned how to fight with real swords for the 2003 drama—and nearly lost his head in the process. “Tom’s neck was right in front of me and I tried to stop swinging my sword, but it was hard to control with one hand,” Cruise’s costar Hiroyuki Sanada told reporters in 2004, explaining that he finally stopped the sword a half inch from Cruise’s neck. “The film crew watching from the side all screamed because they thought Tom’s head would fly off.”

Do stuntmen get upset when Tom Cruise claims that he performs his own stunts?

You might think that professional stuntmen don’t like it when Cruise does their job for them, but that’s not quite the case. Even though Cruise performs many of the scenes himself, stunt coordinators are on hand to choreograph things and make it all safe, and there are still stunt doubles for riskier scenes. In Mission: Impossible 2, for example, a stunt double filled in for Cruise during the rock climbing cliff-hang.

“It is not an ego thing for Tom at all,” Wade Eastwood, a stunt coordinator on several Cruise projects, told Men’s Journal in 2015. “He wants to do it all, and he works hard to build the skill sets he needs for each project.”

That same year, stuntman Randy Butcher reviewed some of Cruise’s most famous stunts for Vulture, and he was mostly impressed by what he saw. “Balls of steel,” Butcher said of Cruise’s Burj Khalifa climb. “He was definitely outside that building. He hung outside that building. I’m not convinced it’s him running down the side. It’s entirely possible that it is. But the closeups of climbing, with that glove—that takes incredible nerve.”

Are there movies where Tom Cruise didn't do his stunts?

It’s not so much that there are movies where he doesn’t do his own stunts as it is that he has help while doing his own stunts. In Top Gun: Maverick, for example, he wasn’t actually flying an F-18, but he was in the cockpit with a real naval pilot.

The man just loves stunt work, and that’s all there is to it. “The first time of any stunt is nerve-wracking, but it’s also exhilarating,” Cruise said during a 2021 interview on The Graham Norton Show. “I have been told a few times during shooting a stunt to stop smiling.”

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