Don’t argue with Tom Cruise (about stunts)

Now that the Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning press tour is underway, we’re starting to get some stories out of Tom Cruise and one of them, amazingly, isn’t just about how he’s here to ENTERTAIN, which is the thing he keeps saying over and over again. Here’s one that made me laugh and, obviously, it’s about stunts. 

During the recent press conference in Tokyo, Tom was talking about how Christopher McQuarrie wanted to get a shot of him doing some crazy sh-t on a plane. And we’re used to this by now, right? Tom Cruise is always doing some crazy sh-t on a plane, a train, a bike, whatever. What we’re not used to is hearing that he CANNOT. Per IGN:

"It was the simplest thing,” McQuarrie added about the particular stunt that tripped Cruise up. “Anything you'd describe, [he'd] say, 'No, you actually can't do that.' And I don't hear 'can't' from him.”

But for Cruise, who has now done a whole host of death-defying stunts on the M:I films over the years, his experience really told him everything he needed to know. "I said, 'Just in terms of the speed, because the force of the air, for me to move quickly on the wing was… You just can't do it,'" the actor insisted, explaining how a “20-minute tutorial” got McQuarrie to understand where he was coming from. "You're limited by the physics of how fast the aircraft is traveling and the force of the wind, that was utterly brutal. So I just said, 'Listen, I think the best thing is if you just do it. Go out, sit in the airplane, go out on the wing, and feel it. Feel the pressure. So, here I am, training him."

Did you see what he did there? He turned a “cannot” into a brag, where he’s the one explaining to the director everything he knows about physics and g-force or whatever the f-ck – and the point being that he’s the expert and don’t you ever forget it. 

The other point is don’t argue with him about stunts because if you insist that he’s wrong, he will make you go out and sit on the wing of the plane while it’s in flight, WTF?! If it were me I’d just be like, OK, Tom, I believe you. Let me just stay on this couch and concede that you know it all. 

Anyway, here’s Tom and the M:I team in Seoul yesterday for the presser and the premiere where, as you can see, he and the other actors were throwing out finger hearts all over the place, as one does when they’re in Korea. 

Tom will be in London this weekend for premieres and junkets and then from there he’ll head to Cannes to bring the M:I chaos to the Croisette. After that they’ll make their way to North America and he announced yesterday that he’s personally doing a series of appearances in Texas at several theatres, setting up a possible reunion with Glen Powell? Is he going to help him promote his bbq sauce? Are they going to eat bbq sauce while piloting a fighter jet? It’s not completely out of the realm of possibility.