By now, Mission: Impossible as a franchise has embraced its signature stunts as a series trademark. Elaborate action sequences that are performed practically for real, with its lead star risking it all, provides a level of daredevilry that keeps its audiences glued to the screens and coming back for more. Consequently, the studio has wholeheartedly accepted this staple as well, with Paramount Pictures smartly baking in the stunts performed for real into the movie’s marketing. The very first behind-the-scenes featurette for Dead Reckoning Part One was a near 10-minute look at the now famous cliff jump bike stunt, with another one released around the Rome car chase sequence.
Tom Cruise is the man of the hour, but his co-stars Hayley Atwell and Simon Pegg are all in on this elaborate scheme as well. It follows then that the press junket for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One devotes a lot more focus to the stunts and action sequences compared to character development and storytelling. Snippets from different interviews have emerged that see the actors speaking on Cruise’s methoddology of performing these stunts as well as the planning, effort, and numerous rehearsals that go behind making them seem as effortless as possible. I thought instead of doing separate pieces on the same thing, it might be a good idea to combine them into one elaborate article.
Let’s start with the man himself. Every movie in the Mission: Impossible series has had a signature stunt that becomes the highlight of the film’s promotions. We’ve seen Cruise scaling the Burj Khalifa in Dubai in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, hanging onto a plane and holding his breath underwater for 6 minutes in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, and piloting a plane as well as riding a bike on the streets of Paris without donning a helmet in Mission: Impossible – Fallout. As exhilarting as these stunts look, they all require an immeasurable amount of prep work and rehearsals, with lots of moving pieces that could possibly go wrong. Explaining the effort it took to executing the stunt in which we see his bike jumping off a cliff, Cruise explained the nuts and bolts of the scene from avoiding hitting drone cameras to ensuring that the jump is calcualted and engineered just right to avoid the bike from getting blown off the ramp and ram into the helicopter capturing the shot ahead.
It’s funny that you mentioned engineering, because there’s as you know, there’s a lot of engineering in there to figure out that ramp, where the bowl is, the speed, you know, we’re testing wind conditions early on, I set all that up. That’s how I approach these things.
You know, I’m thinking, first of all, Mc Q [director Christopher McQuarrie] and I, we come up with something and then go, ‘how do we do it?’ and we break it down. And luckily, like I’ve been skydiving for years and [riding] motorcycles and [doing] jumps, but you’ve got to hone it and make it perfect. I’m thinking about performance, I’m thinking about where’s that helicopter going across the stuff to make sure I don’t get blown off of the ramp.
This isn’t nearly the end of all troubles. Once the bike falls down, the parachute needs to work and open up at just the right time, all while avoiding contact with the cliff’s edge, something that came almost close to happening, as Cruise explains.
I don’t want to get blown off that ramp. And once I hit it, I don’t want that drone to hit me, you know? And then when my chute opens and you can see it in EPK when I’m in the bowl and I was testing the wind in that bowl and I jumped out of the helicopter… you can see when I opened it, I was in the wrong position and I opened the parachute, and the parachute turned into the side of the mountain.
I could just at the last second, I was very close. My chute was pretty close to the side of the mountain. So you really have to watch every aspect of that to make sure that [nothing goes wrong]. You know, I’ve got a few things on my mind when I’m doing that. Plus I’m producing the movie. And it was day one. So I’m thinking, ‘Let’s get through this, let’s get this done.’
That level of preparation and dedication is precisely why co-star Simon Pegg feels it’s incorrect to label Cruise as crazy. He puts in a lot of hard work and rehearsing into his stunts to meticulously execute them, and is far from being reckless about them, a perception that some fans may have when they see the finished product on-screen.
Tom trains for it; he researches it. He works so hard on doing the stunt, making it as safe as it possibly can be. He’s not reckless in any way. It’s a misnomer to call him crazy because he’s not. He’s very sane when it comes to this kind of stuff. They just ratchet it up again and again. It’s fascinating to watch and truly awe-inspiring that they actually manage to do it. And they will do it again. It is quite extraordinary.
While Cruise’s co-stars generally stay away from accompanying him on these dangerous stunts, actresses Rebecca Ferguson and franchise newcomer Hayley Atwell have had their share of partaking in some daring sequences. I don’t have any quotes from Ferguson, but Atwell was all praise for Cruise’s methodology and efficiency as well as the physical shape he’s in to carry out such sequences, not just once, but multiple times with different takes. She had already showered praise on Cruise’s work ethic during the premiere, so this only cements her opinion of her lead co-star.
He’s an athlete, he is a stuntman, and he’s one of the best in the world. When he comes to set, not only is he fully engaged in the technical side of things and the acting side of things, but he is so clear and aware physically of what needs to happen for a stunt to go not only smoothly, but in a dynamic way. [He uses] multiple takes, different lenses, different angles, and different levels of performance. And his commitment is knowing how to be competent at something, and therefore safe – because he’s not careful in the sense of putting himself on guard.
He actually kind of goes, “I want to be fearless in this way. I can only be fearless if I really know what I’m doing technically and physically and [am] really good at it.” And so for me, I trust him implicitly because I also know he trusts himself. His level of detail and attention, and his care for us and very much his care for me, was very much a mentor.
With so much effort and conviction put behind the stunts, I’m sure Dead Reckoning is going to deliver some jaw-dropping moments that will have cinema audiences gasping collectively, just as they did with 2018’s Fallout.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One releases in theaters on July 12, 2023.
