Throughout the Mission: Impossible saga, Tom Cruise has taken on all kinds of wild stunts – but even by his own standards, The Final Reckoning conta
Throughout the Mission: Impossible saga, Tom Cruise has taken on all kinds of wild stunts – but even by his own standards, The Final Reckoning contains some next level jaw-droppers. There’s the entire biplane sequence, which finds Cruise clinging to (and moving between!) two aircraft in the film’s climactic chase; and the mind-boggling underwater setpiece, with the actor caught in a swirling maelstrom of missiles. But there’s one thing that was held back from any of the marketing – the moment, during the aerial sequence, where Ethan Hunt careens through the air, only for his parachute to burn up before his very eyes. Gulp.
It should come as no surprise that Cruise did it for real: in the sky, for real, with a burning parachute, for real. The sequence required Cruise to first leap from a plane with his flaming ‘chute, then free-fall for a while, before deploying a secondary parachute to give him a (theoretically) safe landing. “Our landing zone was at 6,000 feet,” Cruise tells Empire, explaining what went into the stunt. “The air is thinner, you’re landing at higher speeds. Every landing was like a crash landing. Never a uninteresting moment, man.”
Cruise was even responsible for starting his own fire. “He was actually lighting the thing himself,” The Final Reckoning stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood reveals. “He was turning the camera on before he jumped out, he was lighting the parachute, he was doing the whole shot.” Talk about ‘light the fuse’. Eastwood went to lengths to limit the amount of times Cruise threw himself (with an actual flaming parachute) into the fray. “I didn’t tell him, but I actually hid the last burning parachute because I didn’t want him to do it anymore,” he laughs. Mission accomplished.
Read more on Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning in the Tron: Ares issue, on sale Thursday 3 July. Pre-order a copy online here. Listen to Empire’s three-hour The Final Reckoning spoiler interview with Christopher McQuarrie on the Empire Spoiler Special Podcast feed. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is out now in cinemas.
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