Tom Cruise Reveals Insane BTS of His "Brutal" Zero-G Mission: Impossible Plane Stunt
"When you see it, everybody, you're gonna freak out," Jimmy Fallon said of the actor's real-life wing walking.
When it comes to making movies, few are willing to go the extra mile more than Tom Cruise. And in the case of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, the star, producer, and self-designated stuntman was willing to go few more extra miles up into the air to reach "zero gravity," as the 62-year-old actor explained to Jimmy Fallon.
When Cruise visited The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on May 19 to talk playing Ethan Hunt for an eighth film in the action series, Fallon shared that he'd already seen the film. "It was like seeing, like, five giant great movies in one movie," Fallon told Cruise. "I don't know how you do all this stuff."
After looking back at a few of his most unforgettable, thoroughly death-defying onscreen capers ("that was fun," the actor said of hanging off a cliff), Cruise shared BTS footage of preparing for the centerpiece stunt with director Christopher McQuarrie, as well as a photo of the talked-about The Final Reckoning scene.
"But do you manifest it? Like, do you see an idea in your head and go, 'Oh, I think that would be a great stunt. I want to do that' and you see yourself doing it?" Fallon asked.
"Yeah, I do," Cruise laughed. And while it took a year and a half to practice the Mission: Impossible 8 plane stunt, "it took decades to figure it out, honestly."
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Tom Cruise "can't breathe" when dangling from an upside-down biplane in Mission: Impossible 8
"I remember seeing, like, black and white footage of the very early days of wing walking, and I just thought, 'I'd love to do that.' I was a little kid," Cruise told Fallon. The actor's early love of aerial sequences led to Top Gun and his passion for flying "jets and airplanes and helicopter and aerobatics" with his pilot's license. While talking out Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning with director McQuarrie, they decided it was a great opportunity for Cruise to go wing walking.
After selecting an airplane Cruise knew how to fly, "we just start seeing how can I get zero G between the wings" — as in, if not quite defying gravity, achieving a look and feel of weightlessness.
"I don't know if you've ever had your hand outside a window going about 145 miles an hour," Cruise joked to the audience, adding, "Well, 60 miles an hour and then, you know, multiply it — but feel the force of it. It was pretty intense, I gotta say."
"How do you breathe?!" Fallon asked of achieving that height outside an aircraft.
"I mean, that's a good question," Cruise said. "I didn't realize, that amount of force of air — I can't breathe. So I had to figure out how you're taking the wind, and you're breathing down here like this," he said, bending over. "And I mean, the air particles coming off that propeller are traveling at the speed of sound."
"The force of the air when I got close to the fuselage was brutal. I mean, the air going over the wing, period, was brutal," Cruise continued. "But when the airplane went upside down, then also, the engine would stop."
"Tom, this is insane," a visibly stressed-out Fallon told him. But Cruise assured him they "spent a lot of time figuring this stuff out" so he wouldn't, you know, careen to the ground when the engine cut out.
But there's another physics problem when you're executing a stunt like this. "It is the most intense weight workout you've ever had. Have you ever lifted a weight where you cannot — it's impossible to lift it again? That's what it's like after a couple of minutes on this wing," explaining that they went from 95 to 145 miles an hour. "Because a lot of the stuff you're seeing, I've got to get to zero G as I'm floating in between the wings, and trying to maneuver up and down the wings."
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"And as he's going, it's throwing me in different directions. I don't know, it was crazy," Cruise admitted, before sharing a behind-the-scenes look at how Cruise and McQuarrie prepared for the biplane stunt. "This is months into the evolution, probably about a year and a half as we're testing stuff."
The footage of their test is jaw-dropping, with Cruise seemingly barely hanging onto the red airplane's wing and nothing but a cord tying him to the craft. In a voiceover, McQuarrie explains that "When Tom is on the wing, we have to communicate via hand signal because the winds are from 100 to 140 miles an hour."
In addition to the wing walking, Fallon marveled at what the rest of Mission: Impossible 8 has in store. "There's car chases, there's hand-to-hand combat. What you do to that dude's face with the treadmill... I'm not gonna spoil it, but it's great."
Watch the preview of Tom Cruise's zero-G biplane stunt from Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning above, and watch The Tonight Show weeknights at 11:35/10:35 on NBC, streaming next day on Peacock.
