Tom Cruise took his daredevil stunts to new heights while filming Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning, but the actor admitted that he almost walked away with a life-altering injury.
Cruise, 63, provided commentary in bonus content featured in the film’s digital release, sharing that the scene in which he hung off of a biplane was quite painful.
“Oh, this almost broke my back,” he noted as the scene played over the commentary, to which director Christopher McQuarrie replied, “You’re talking about a lot of pain here.”
Cruise also revealed that the crew had to “shoot in Africa twice because of the weather and the cold, and it was so demanding.”
“And once you shot it for real, there was no way to fake it,” McQuarrie added.
McQuarrie directed the scene from a helicopter and praised the “great camera operating” from his crew, along with the man who operated the helicopter.
Cruise also pulled off another daring stunt when he held onto a belt on the side of the plane, dangling his legs in the air. He described the scene as “brutal” to film, noting it was “so punishing on this wing.” He assured viewers that everything in the scene was “all real.”
“This separated the joints in Tom’s fingers from the force,” McQuarrie revealed. “By the time we finished the sequence, your hands were absolutely swollen. It was so painful to watch.”
At one point in the scene, the engine of the plane stopped, causing Cruise’s body to hit the side of the plane with force. “That was a hard one,” Cruise confessed, explaining that part of the scene was improvised.
McQuarrie shared that it was also Cruise’s idea to stab through the side of the plane during the scene. “This was really fun,” he said.
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Fans of the Mission Impossible franchise are familiar with Cruise’s death-defying stunts and tales of injuries he has sustained in the past. While filming the 2000 Mission: Impossible 2 opening sequence, Cruise had a broken ankle.
“What people don’t know is that there’s a section where I’m jumping high to low, but my foot was broken. And I never mentioned it to anyone,” he told Empire in February. “Some of these injuries, what’s the point? You just keep going. So I’m jumping, and my foot wasn’t right. John Woo was like, ‘We’ve got the shot.’ I was like, ‘No, we want it in one shot, I gotta keep doing it.’ And that’s the shot that’s in the movie. But it was so much fun working with John, doing that sequence, because I knew it was our [marketing] campaign.”
