Tom Cruise nearly died during stunt for ‘Mission: Impossible–The Final Reckoning’

Tom Cruise at the premiere for “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” during the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival on May 14, 2025. PHOTO: EPA-EFE via The Straits Times

CANNES – Tom Cruise’s film crew on his latest Mission: Impossible epic feared the American actor was about to die after he appeared to pass out on the wing of a stunt plane over South Africa.

The 62-year-old Hollywood star, who does his own stunts and was flying the biplane alone, was laid out flat on the wing after spending 22 minutes out of the cockpit – 10 more than safety guidelines allowed, the movie’s director Christopher McQuarrie told a masterclass at the Cannes Film Festival 2025. “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” premiered at the festival.

The eighth installment of the hit action spy franchise (1996 to present), known for its dizzying set pieces and heart-stopping action scenes, opens in Singapore cinemas on May 17.

“When you leave the cockpit of the plane, it’s like stepping onto the surface of another planet,” McQuarrie, 56, said. “The wind is hitting you in excess of 140 miles an hour (225km/h) coming off the propeller. You’re breathing, but only physically – you’re not actually getting oxygen.”

Added the American filmmaker, who has shot the last four movies of the series: “Tom had pushed himself to the point that he was so physically exhausted, he couldn’t get back up off the wing. He was lying on the wing, his arms hanging over the front. We could not tell if he was conscious or not.”

Cruise, a trained acrobatics pilot, had agreed on a hand signal to show if he was in trouble, McQuarrie said.

“You can’t do this when you’re unconscious,” he told an audience at Cannes, with Cruise sitting beside him and nodding sheepishly.

To make matters worse, the plane had only six minutes of fuel left. But the star finally stirred.

“We watched Tom as he pulled himself up and stuck his head in the cockpit so that he could replenish the oxygen in his body, and then climb up into the cockpit and bring the plane safely down to land.

“No one on Earth can do that but Tom Cruise,” McQuarrie said to rapturous applause.

When asked about how he dealt with the fear, Cruise pointed to the years of preparation that went into the Mission: Impossible movies, which he compared to the workings of “a Swiss watch.”

But in the end, “I like the feeling (of fear). It’s just an emotion for me. It’s something that is not paralyzing.”

“I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s exciting’… I don’t mind kind of encountering the unknown,” he said, insisting that “this is what I dreamt of doing as a kid.”

It was far from being the only scare the pair had on the US$400-million (S$519-million) epic.

With fans fearing that The Final Reckoning title meant it would be the last in the series, McQuarrie said the plane scene was not the only one that could have ended everything.

One of the new sequel’s most dramatic moments involves Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt diving inside a sunk Russian nuclear submarine in the Bering Sea.

McQuarrie said it took 2½ years to build the set in London.

“Remember that when you’re watching Tom inside this semi-submerged rotating room inside the submarine, that is housed inside a 60-foot diameter, 1,000-ton, 360-degree rotating, fully submersible steel gimbal in a 8.5-million-liter tanker. And he’s inside it,” he said.

“And what you’re watching is us testing it. Because there is no way to test that thing.

“We built a model, and we put a little plastic figure and a bunch of torpedoes in it, and rotated it once, and they smashed the little plastic figure.”

Neither Cruise nor McQuarrie would confirm or deny if the new movie was the final Mission: Impossible, with Cruise calling it the “culmination of three decades of work.”

The film, one of the most expensive ever made, had to struggle through Covid-19 lockdowns and two Hollywood strikes.

But the wait appears to be worth it, according to The Hollywood Reporter, which quoted critics emerging from the first press screenings calling it “astonishing,” “jaw-dropping,” “just insane” and the “best action movie of the summer”. AFP  /ra