Tom Cruise filmed his riskiest Mission: Impossible stunt on the first day, just in case it failed

LOS ANGELES – Mission: Impossible actor Tom Cruise filmed the riskiest stunt of the upcoming seventh movie on the first day, just in case it failed.

The death-defying stunt in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, which opens in Singapore in July, is billed as the most dangerous of the 60-year-old’s acting career.

Cruise is known for doing his own stunts and, in the previous instalment of the franchise, he broke his ankle while leaping from one building to another.

This time, he rides a motorcycle off a cliff in Norway’s Helsetkopen mountain and then free-falls before opening his parachute at the last minute.

“Either we’re gonna continue with the film or we’re not,” he said about the decision in an interview with TV programme Entertainment Tonight.

“Let’s know (on) day one: What is gonna happen? Do we all continue? Or is it a major rewrite, you know?”

For the US$290 million (S$389 million) blockbuster, he reportedly trained for the stunt by doing 30 jumps out of a plane a day, for a total of over 500 skydives, as well as more than 13,000 motocross jumps.

He said: “I was training, I was ready. You have to be razor-sharp when you do something like that, so it was very important as we were prepping the film that that actually was the first thing.

“Because I don’t want to drop that and then go shoot other things, and then have my mind somewhere else. Everyone was prepped – let’s just get it done.”

In the end, he performed the stunt six times and delivered a line while in free fall.

Co-star Simon Pegg, 53, who has been in the franchise since the third film, spoke about the stunt, which took place in September 2020, at the film’s premiere in Rome on Monday.

“There’s always a sense that, you know, one day, something might go wrong, we might lose Tom,” he said to entertainment portal Deadline.

“Any time there’s a big stunt, we all have that sense of fear, but he always pulls it off.”