Tom Cruise has never steered away from challenging himself in his roles for projects. Especially since 1986’s Top Gun, he has continued to push the limits of his body and acting, taking on his own stunts in most of his top films, including Mission: Impossible, The Last Samurai and Jack Reacher.
Most recently, Cruise took on several death-defying stunts in 2025’s Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and 2023’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, including dangling from an upside-down plane as well as driving a motorcycle off a cliff and parachuting to safety.
The actor has previously said during an appearance on The Graham Norton Show that he has been “doing different stunts” since he was a child and that once he got into acting, he wanted to keep doing it to help with the “storytelling.”
“I feel that [when] acting you’re bringing everything, you know, physically and emotionally, to a character in a story,” he explained at the time. “And I’m able to do it [stunts], and I’ve trained for 30 years doing things like this that it allows us to put cameras in places where you normally are not able to.”
More recently, during a conversation at Cannes in 2022, Cruise reiterated that he enjoys performing his own stunts despite the danger, only this time he referenced one of the best athletes of Hollywood’s golden era.
“No one asked Gene Kelly, ‘Why do you dance?’” the actor said. “Why do you do your own dancing?’”
Below, The Hollywood Reporter has compiled a list of some of Cruise’s wildest stunts, some downright death-defying, throughout his decades-long career.
- died while shooting aerial footage for the movie.
“Tom was in a full body harness and he’s cabled and wired to the plane through [its] door. Inside the aircraft was an aluminum truss that was carefully bolted to the plane, which held the wires that went through the door, which held Tom,” the cinematographer said of the safety measures. “He was also wearing special contact lenses to protect his eyes. If anything hit him at those speeds, it could be really bad. They were very careful about cleaning the runway so there were no rocks. And we took off in certain weather conditions; there were no birds. And he’s sort of protected by the way the air moves over the wing.”
“It’s something I have always wanted to do,” Cruise said during an interview with USA Today at the time. “We’re underwater and we’re doing breath-holds of 6 to 6-1/2 minutes. So I was doing all my training with the other stuff (on-set). It was very taxing stuff.”
In the scene, while attached to two safety wires, Cruise’s character is meant to jump from one high-rise to another when chasing Henry Cavill’s character. Although he was meant to miss the landing and hit the side of the wall, his foot actually slipped and bent upwards on impact. The actor noted that he “knew instantly it was broken.” Cruise also revealed that his ankle was still healing while he was on the press tour for the film.
‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’ (Motorbiking Off a Cliff Scene)
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lsFs2615gw?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]
For Mission: Impossible 7, Tom Cruise said he got to do a stunt that he had wanted to do “since I was a little kid.” And that stunt was riding a motorbike off a cliff and parachuting down to safety. Director Christopher McQuarrie explained that there were many elements needed to actually make it happen, as well as years of different types of training. Once Cruise felt like he was comfortable with each aspect of the stunt, that’s when the crew built the film’s final ramp on a cliff in Norway. A crewmember added that Cruise did a total of six takes of one of the “biggest stunts in cinema history.”
‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ (Dangling From Plane Scene)
For the final installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise, Cruise really went out with a bang, completing one of his most difficult stunts to date. In The Final Reckoning, the actor can be seen dangling from an upside-down plane during one of the sequences. A behind-the-scenes clip of the scene also notes how physically demanding the stunt was for Cruise. “You can’t imagine how physically punishing it was for Tom to be on the wing,” a voice says in the video. “The wind distorts your vision. It’s almost impossible to breathe.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGQcnZ3esvU?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]