Tom Cruise’s best movie stunts: From six minutes underwater

It’s enough to give any movie insurer a heart attack to see their million-dollar leading man dangling off skyscrapers and hanging off the wings of planes. But that’s exactly what Tom Cruise has spent his five decades-long career doing.

On Sunday, he shared a video promoting Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, parts one and two, which he is filming in South Africa, and to thank fans for watching Top Gun: Maverick in cinemas.

“As always, thank you for allowing us to entertain you. It truly is the honour of a lifetime. I’m running out of altitude, so I’ve got to get back to work. We’ve got to get this shot. You have a very safe and happy holiday. We’ll see you at the movies."

Even at the age of 60, Cruise still does most of his own stunts. “I feel that [when acting] you're bringing everything, you know, physically and emotionally, to a character in a story,” he told Graham Norton on his UK talk show. “I’ve trained for 30 years doing [stunts] and it allows us to put cameras where you are normally not able to.”

With Top Gun: Maverick one of the year’s biggest hits, and the seventh instalment in the Mission Impossible franchise out next year, we take a look back at 10 of Cruise’s most spectacular stunts …

Mission: Impossible — Fallout, 2018
Cruise trained for 16 hours a day to master not only flying a helicopter in the sixth instalment of the action franchise, but also to pull off a spinning dive in it.

In the scene Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt goes into a 360° corkscrew dive in a H125 helicopter, a move which trained pilots spend months learning about in the classroom before moving to a simulator and then the real thing. “Cruise put in about three months of solid days in the classroom and in the air to gain the skills that he needed,” said Wired.

Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, 2015
To retrieve a computer chip that will help him track down the baddy Soloman Lane (Sean Harris), Ethan Hunt has to dive into an underwater safe, while evading a fast-swinging crane circling around.

After jumping off a 36.6m ledge into a 6m-deep water tank, Cruise held his breath for six and a half minutes to pull off the stunt in one take.

Top Gun: Maverick, 2022
Cruise got back in the pilot seat to reprise his role as Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in this year’s blockbuster. And in true Cruise form, he did most of the aerial stunts himself, enduring eight g-force in the F/A-18 jets which the US Department of Defence lent to the movie for $11,000 per hour.

“Every time we went up there you have to mentally brace for a fight. You get on the ground and you’re exhausted,” Glenn Powell who played Lt. Jake “Hangman” Seresin told The Ringer. “That’s what’s impressive about Tom. He’s flying more than anyone in the movie — he would fly three times a day.”

Mission: Impossible — Fallout, 2018
Cruise’s stunt work in the most recent M:I instalment made headlines when it was revealed he had broken his ankle during a particularly daring stunt.

Pictures of the actor’s foot bent back the wrong way emerged after he hit a building leaping from one roof to another, causing production to be halted for six weeks.

“I knew instantly my ankle was broken and I really didn’t want to do it again so just got up and carried on with the take,” he told Norton. “I said, ‘It’s broken. That’s a wrap. Take me to hospital’ and then everyone got on the phone and made their vacation arrangements.”

Mission Impossible — Dead Reckoning: Part One, 2023
According to the Hollywood rumour mill, Cruise practised riding a bike off a Norwegian cliff a whopping 13,000 times to perfect the stunt that will appear in the upcoming movie. He also tried the skydiving scene 500 times to nail the shot which appears at the end of the trailer.

The Mummy, 2017
“There was a lot of barfing,” said Alex Kurtzman, the film’s writer and director of the 64 takes Tom Cruise did to nail the cargo plane's crash scene in the movie. He said it was the crew — not Cruise — who suffered.

The actor did the stunt inside a Nasa plane which is used to train astronauts for zero gravity. The plane goes up for 25,000 feet before plummeting in free fall for 22 seconds. Despite being offered the chance to create the scene on a studio soundstage the actor opted for the plane for more realism.