Tom Cruise Does An Insane Stunt Hanging Outside A Plane For ‘M:I — Rogue Nation’

Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation is coming to theaters on July 31, and the movie’s stunts are already getting all the attention. Last year, the movie’s crew revealed that Cruise hung on the side of an airplane for a few seconds during its taking-off for one stunt. In the movie’s first full (and incredible) trailer, we are told that that if the stunts look real, it’s because they are real.

In the video, Cruise explains his anxiety about this stunt. He says he absolutely “couldn’t sleep the night before.” The stunt, which was done in eight takes, looks incredibly insane. It’s also one of the most creative stunts of the series since his infamous climbing of the Burj Khalifa building in Mission: Impossible 4, explains director Christopher McQuarrie. “As dangerous as the Burj Khalifa was – and it was incredibly dangerous – the Burj Khalifa was static. And here you’re moving at such high speeds. If a bird hit him at that sort of a speed, that would have been it,” he says.

More than falling to the ground, bird strikes were Cruise’s biggest fear. “I remember one time we were going down the runway and there was just a little particle that just hit me, it was smaller than a finger nail. I was thankful it didn’t hit my hands or face, if it did I’d have a problem because those parts were exposed, but it still could have broken my ribs”, he told Yahoo UK.

Wade Eastwood, stunt coordinator on the movie, noted that “you can’t hang a multimillion-dollar star on the outside of an airplane and fly around in a normal world, but Tom wanted to be on the outside of that plane.”