Tom Cruise Was Said to Be Better Than ‘Most Stuntmen’
Tom Cruise has been known to do his own stunts even well into his older years. But his physical work is so impressive that it’s even gotten praise from some veteran stuntmen.
How Tom Cruise’s stunts surpassed actual stuntmen’s
Cruise has been interested in doing physical stunts even long before he was a movie star. Speaking at the premiere of Top Gun Maverick, Cruise explained how he used to orchestrate his own stunts when he was a kid.
“I think I was about 4½ years old, and I had this doll, and you throw it up in the air and a parachute comes down. I played with this thing, and I’d throw it off a tree, and I was like, ‘I really want to do this.’ I remember taking the sheets off my bed, and I would tie a rope … and I climbed up to the eave, and I got up to the roof. I looked and my mother was in the kitchen — she had four kids — and I jumped off the roof,” he said according to Yahoo.
After succeeding in the film industry, Cruise was able to parlay his passion for stunts into his film work. And despite the constant risk of physical injury, Cruise has shown no signs of slowing down in his older years.
In an interview with Bang Showbiz (via Contact Music), stunt coordinator Rob Alonzo once shared what made Cruise’s stunt work so special.
”Tom is so well rounded, he’s better than most stunt men,” Alonzo said. “He’s an incredible driver, an incredible fighter and stunt performer. He flies planes, he knows how to ride horses, he rides motorcylces, so any director would be lucky to have a guy like that because they can keep the camera on him the whole time and it’s more engaging.”
But Cruise didn’t just do stunts for the sake of the thrills. He did them for the sake of the movie-going audience as well.
”Tom does his own stunts on everything, he won’t allow a stuntman to do it for him, primarily because he knows that the audience is smart. That type of commitment and dedication is incredible. With Tom, we design the action to fit what he can do and that’s why it looks so great,” he said.
Tom Cruise’s latest stunts left his ‘Mission Impossible’ co-stars hysterical
Cruise’s passion for stunts came in full display in the recent Mission Impossible movies. Dead Reckoning saw the actor indulge in many death-defying scenes like driving a motorcycle off of a mountain. As well as a one-handed car chase.
Cruise’s longtime Mission Impossible co-star Simon Pegg once shared what it was like seeing these stunts in person. Most of the time, Pegg shared that the cast and crew had full faith in Cruise. Especially because of the amount of preparation Cruise did for his action sequences.
“Tom is very, very diligent when it comes to preparing for these things. He’s not crazy. Everyone says, oh, he must be crazy. He does, you know, but he trains hard. Everything is in place. It’s a well-oiled machine,” Pegg said in an interview with CBS News.
Still, even Pegg and the other cast members were nervous about Cruise’s safety this time around.
“We were up there just to see it. … We were all a bit hysterical because, I mean, we trust him and we trust the system. We trust everything involved,” Pegg said. “But still, it’s nerve-wracking, and he would disappear, and then we’d wait and there’d be a big sort of pause. And then you’d hear good canopy, which meant his chute had opened at least. But he still had to get down to the boom. So it was exhilarating, to say the least.”
