The 10 Wildest Tom Cruise Stunts, Ranked

Audiences piling into cinemas to watch Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning will be hyped for one aspect of the movie above all others: the stunts. Over the course of his career, star Tom Cruise has amassed a barely believable catalogue of stunts that would normally be performed by professional stuntmen, but which are routinely undertaken by the man himself. Check out our countdown of the 10 wildest Cruise stunts so far, then find out where to watch the movies with our comprehensive streaming guide. Take care!

10. This movie rocks

Cruise isn’t actually free climbing in the opening scene of Mission: Impossible II, because if he’d fallen there was a safety wire to stop him plummeting to his certain death. But he is scaling Deadhorse Point in Utah under his own steam, hanging off the rock by his fingertips and putting himself at considerable risk of injury: even with the wire, a fall could easily have seen him smash against the side of the jagged natural edifice. The sequence is not even necessary, since it’s right at the start before the narrative gets going. It’s just high-level showing off and we’re not complaining.

9. Mummy! Help me!

The vast majority of Cruise’s best stunt work has been done in the M:I movies, but not all of it. There’s a little corker in The Mummy, when Tom’s character Sergeant Nick Morton is on a cargo plane that’s hit by a massive bird strike. As the aircraft tailspins towards the ground, it would have been perfectly possible for the scene to have been done with wires and a green screen to create the illusion of weightlessness, but no: Cruise insisted on doing it properly, hiring a Nasa training plane that would fly up to 25,000 feet before free-falling. You can see the G-force.

8. Tanking at the box office

The very first instalment in the Mission: Impossible franchise contains a stunt that is a lot more dangerous than perhaps it looks, and much more so than the film’s famous dangling vault heist, which looks cool but has no peril at all. Ethan Hunt decides to blow up a giant aquarium and then run away, creating a twist on the action-movie staple where an actor sprints towards the camera as something explodes behind him. Instead of escaping flames, Cruise has to properly shift to avoid being hit by thousands of gallons of rushing water, the impact of which could have been pretty nasty. 

7. Up, up and away

Lincolnshire is not generally a dangerous county, but during the shooting of Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation it played host to yet another of those moments where Ethan Hunt’s antics could have led to Tom Cruise being badly hurt. At RAF Wittering, rocks were painstakingly cleared from the runway, and weather conditions that were likely to discourage birds were waited for, so that Cruise could cling to the outside of an Airbus A400M Atlas before and during takeoff without being hit by speeding debris or an airborne animal. With much of the safety apparatus cleverly hidden, it’s one of the franchise’s most satisfying stunts, and of course Cruise didn’t just do it once: at any given point you’re watching one of eight takes.

6. Handling a chopper

Perhaps Cruise’s most impressive “that’s really him doing that” stunt arrives in Mission: Impossible – Fallout, when Ethan Hunt pilots a helicopter in an airborne standoff with dodgy CIA guy August Walker (Henry Cavill). As so often with Cruise, it’s a sequence that could have been done using trickery to make it look like he was flying a helicopter, but that’s him executing a corkscrew dive without crashing. He did the requisite hours of training to get the relevant pilot’s licence in record time, then went for it. The bit where the two helicopters crash into each other was, however, rendered in CGI. Even Tom Cruise wouldn’t attempt that.

5. The need for speed

Speed-flying is the hobby you take up if paragliding simply isn’t hazardous enough for you: with a smaller canopy, you can get up to 50 miles per hour, travelling just feet above the ground. This is the sort of thing Tom Cruise does twice before breakfast, so it was no bother for him to add a bit of speed-flying to Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. The crew, however, were terrified as their star swooped rapidly past sharp rocks. Director Christopher McQuarrie pointed out that this stunt was a lot more dangerous than jumping out of a plane: “Sky diving is fairly predictable. Speed-flying is incredibly unpredictable."

4. Don’t look down in Dubai

Yes, Cruise is clipped to a wire in the scene in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol where Ethan Hunt, for reasons that need not make sense, has to move from one floor of Dubai’s 163-storey Burj Khalifa tower to another not by using the lift, but by cutting out a window pane, climbing up the outside, cutting out another sheet of glass and going back in. But when Hunt’s sticky gloves fail and he has to shin up there freestyle by wedging his feet in the window frame and shuffling skywards, that’s all Tom. Cruise evidently enjoyed it: there are out-takes where he tests out the safety set-up by running horizontally, skipping from pane to pane.

3. Simply breathtaking

Free divers who hold their breath underwater all the time are pretty pleased if they can last for more than three minutes. That’s how long Ethan Hunt has to hold out for without oxygen in the scene in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation where he has to break into an, uh, underwater vault. Cruise took himself off to enrol in a military training programme and ended up able to swim underwater for as long as six minutes, if required. He doesn’t stay under for that long but the scene is magnificently tense because you can see that he is, once again, doing what Ethan Hunt is doing, for real.

2. Break a leg

Tom Cruise loves to run, but he had to take several weeks off from sprinting while filming Mission: Impossible – Fallout after his most famous fail. Ethan Hunt is legging it across a series of rooftops, jumping from building to building. There’s a point where one of the leaps is a little too wide and Hunt slams into the wall, clinging on to the side of the roof before pulling himself up and continuing. In reality, the impact broke Cruise’s ankle, and he knew it was busted immediately, but he also knew that if he stopped he wouldn’t have a usable take to comfort him during his weeks in a plaster cast. So he hauled himself up and hobbled out of shot, and that’s the take they used.  

1. Hey, new stunt just dropped

Cruise insisted on performing the notorious motorcycle jump in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One on day one of the shoot. Partly he was super-excited and couldn’t wait, but he also knew that if it went wrong, it would be the end of him and the movie, so they might as well know straight away if it was a goer or he was a goner. The stunt is simply explained: Cruise rides a motorcycle off a cliff. The rehearsals involved 500 skydives and 13,000 motocross jumps, and in case you’re wondering about the camera operator in the helicopter chasing after Cruise, and whether they’d have been for the high jump if they’d not captured the shot perfectly… they had it easy. Cruise did it six times just to make sure.

Now check out our guide to where to stream all the most thrilling Tom Cruise movies in the United Kingdom!