In the new trailer for “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” the franchise’s fifth movie, hitting theaters July 31, Tom Cruise does as Tom Cruise does.
He kicks bad-guy butt, drives a motorbike like a maniac and, oh yeah, hangs from the side of a plane for dear life.
Most actors would have shot that last one in front of a green screen with a big ol’ fan. But not Cruise, the action star known for doing all his own stunts.
The stunt coordinator strapped him to the outside of an A400M military airbus, which took off at the steepest angle possible, then sped up to a terrifying 160 knots.
It all begs the question — with millions upon millions of box-office dollars on the line, how on earth does one of the world’s biggest movie stars get the insurance to tempt death?
“He stomps his feet and fights for it and tells [the studio] that basically if they don’t [let him], he’s not going to do the movie,” laughs Wade Eastwood, the movie’s stunt coordinator and Cruise’s friend. “When he wants to do something cool, he’ll fight to the death in order to do it.”
Brian Kingman, the managing director for Gallagher Entertainment, which insures studio films, says that safeguards and qualifications make it possible for big stars to do their own stunts — if someone’s willing to pay.
“I mean, if you’ve got enough time, talent and money, anything is insurable,” he says. “All insurers want to know is that things are done safely and any risk is a reasonable one.”
Brad Bird, who directed the last “Mission,” has said that Cruise’s role as a producer on his films gives him the leverage to do it all.
But most action stars don’t get the chance to do their own stunts because they don’t have the power to make it happen.
“You’ve got a lot of actors that get close, like the Hugh Jackmans of the world and the Daniel Craigs — but Tom Cruise and Jackie Chan are the only two I know that do a hundred percent of it themselves,” says Eastwood.
Other stars, well, they simply don’t want to.
“A lot of actors are very happy to say, ‘Oh, bring the stunt double in, I’ll be in my trailer,’ ” says Eastwood.
But he notes that Cruise is one of a kind. “There was no time in the film, whether it was racing bikes, drifting cars at high speed [or] fighting multiple opponents…that I would have replaced Tom with a stuntman,” he says. “They simply couldn’t have done it any better.”