Noted thrill-seeker Tom Cruise has been teasing his insane stunts in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One since last year, when he thanked fans for seeing Top Gun: Maverick in theaters by jumping out of a plane.
With Dead Reckoning Part One’s July 12 release quickly approaching, Cruise just deployed a new stunt video that might be his wildest yet. “It takes a true team effort to perform and film one of the most dangerous sports in the world—speed flying,” the actor tweeted on Thursday alongside the heart-pounding vid.
The clip opens with footage of Cruise spiraling downward through the air, affixed to a parachute, dangerously close to rocky mountain terrain.
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“It’s a very beautiful and delicate sport,” Cruise says of speed flying. “We’re gonna do spirals, and we’re landing at an incredibly high speed, over 80 kilometers an hour.”
The scene was filmed, as Dead Reckoning director Christopher McQuarrie explains, via cameras affixed to people parachuting alongside Cruise.
The footage of Cruise running headlong off a cliff, attached only to that aforementioned parachute, is both cinematically stunning and harrowing, but not quite as harrowing as the motorcycle stunt he teased last year. In that already-iconic video, Cruise and the rest of the Mission: Impossible team explained the effort that went into filming the actor safely (we guess?!) driving a motorcycle off a cliff.
Cruise, by the way, shot the death-defying motorcycle stunt on the very first day of filming Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning.
“I was training and I was ready,” Cruise told Entertainment Tonight. “You have to be razor sharp when you’re doing something like that. It was very important as we were prepping the film that it was actually the first thing. I don’t want to drop that and go shoot other things and have my mind somewhere else. Everyone was prepped. Let’s just get it done.”
Spoken like the true savior of cinema.
