Sure, he jumps a motorcycle off a cliff and then parachutes to safety, but the biggest stunt Tom Cruise pulled off was getting Mission: Impossible 7 and 8 before cameras at all.
To the U.K. movie magazine Empire, the actor and producer detailed his own impossible mission: filming the two movies concurrently, despite COVID-19.
While Cruise famously blasted crew members in that viral recording, the article shows the odds he was up against.
"All my friends in the industry...were like, 'What are we going to do? I could lose my house!'" Cruise shared.
"So I told the studio and I told the industry, 'We’re going to get everyone back to work...And we're going to figure out how to do it safely.'"
Tom details the strict COVID-19 safety protocols they designed for the films -- and which were adopted by many other productions even as the pandemic continued.
Cruise said he personally lobbied the governments of Abu Dhabi, Italy, and Norway to show them how production could occur safely.
Sure enough, it did, with recurring Mission director Christopher McQuarrie at the helm. "[F]or the whole crew to know that we’d started rolling on a movie was just a huge relief," Tom admitted. "It was very emotional, I gotta tell you."
And as for that motorcycle stunt? He called it the most dangerous in his career. "If the wind was too strong, it would blow me off the ramp. The [filming] helicopter was a problem, because I didn't want to be hammering down that ramp at top speed and get hit by a stone...I had about six seconds once I departed the ramp to pull the chute and I don't want to get tangled in the bike..."
The seventh Mission: Impossible film hits theaters May 27, 2022.