There are few actors willing to go the extra, blockbuster mile to make set pieces spectacular quite like Tom Cruise. While he’s probably shortening the life expectancy of Hollywood’s insurers, the actor is more than willing to strap himself to the outside of an airplane in “Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation” (for example), if it means getting a breathtaking sequence for the film. That attitude has carried over to the upcoming “American Made,” where once again, Cruise put himself at risk in order to get a great shot.
Director Doug Liman reveals how it all went down with Yahoo, sharing that Cruise flew a small aircraft for the upcoming drug-smuggling drama/thriller, and at one point, just left the cockpit entirely, while the plane was still in the air. Jeez:
“It can be pretty hair-raising – flying extremely fast, small airplanes, low to the ground, is a dangerous environment to be in just on its own. Then, in the story, he’s throwing bales of cocaine out of the airplane, loading them up with guns, so every once in a while in this scene he’s got to climb out of the cockpit and go to the back of the airplane to dump the cocaine out.
“I’m flying alongside him in a helicopter filming, and that made a big impression on me – there’s nobody in the cockpit of the plane! Tom has gone to the back of the aircraft, and he’s alone in that airplane. It’s one thing to have Tom Cruise alone in the airplane flying it – that’s already outrageous – now he’s alone and he’s not even in the cockpit so he’s gone beyond. It was already a stunt before he left the cockpit, it was already a serious stunt.”
There’s no word yet if Cruise did anything extreme on this weekend’s “The Mummy,” but we’re sure if there was a scene that required him to scale the Great Sphinx, he would’ve busted out his grappling hooks and done it.