Tom Cruise, renowned for pushing the boundaries in his high-octane action roles, reportedly had a brush with death during the filming of Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning.
The movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, revealed to Radar Online that the 62-year-old actor and film producer came perilously close to dying while shooting the final installment in the Mission Impossible franchise. He almost became stranded on the wing of a biplane just moments before it ran out of fuel.
Reflecting on the terrifying incident, McQuarrie explained that being outside a plane is incredibly taxing on the body due to the intense 140 mph winds and difficulty breathing, making it safe for only about 12 minutes.
The 56-year-old filmmaker quipped, “It’s literally like two hours in the gym.”
However, Cruise, the star of the Mission Impossible series, insisted on continuing beyond the 12-minute mark and filmed for an additional 10 minutes.
“There was a moment where Tom had pushed himself to the point that he was so physically exhausted, he couldn’t get back up off the wing,” the producer of Top Gun 2 noted.
“He was lying on the wing of the plane, his arms were hanging over the front. We could not tell if he was conscious or not.”
Remarkably, at that critical juncture, the pilot informed them that only three minutes of fuel remained, yet the plane couldn’t land because Cruise was still incapacitated on the wing.
“We watched Tom as he pulled himself up and stuck his head in the cockpit, so that he could replenish the oxygen in his body and then climb up into the cockpit. No one on earth can do that but Tom,” McQuarrie recalled.
