Against all odds, Tom Cruise outdid himself with his dangerous airplane stunt in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, but how did he achieve it? Tom Cruise has a long list of highly successful movies, yet his acting skills aren't his only tool to maintain his Hollywood superstar status. Throughout the years, he has performed plenty of crazy stunts that have repeatedly put his life at risk, but every time the actor seems to have reached his limit, he comes up with an even crazier display of courage and physical prowess. Tom Cruise has now become the face of elaborate action sequences, drawing massive crowds who are always eager to watch him hanging from a cliff or break his ankle while jumping between rooftops.
After climbing the Burj Khalifa in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, both Tom Cruise and his iconic character Ethan Hunt decided they needed to raise the stakes. In typical Mission Impossible fashion, Rogue Nation opens with Agent William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) leading a mission to intercept a cargo plane in Minsk, Belarus. When computer specialist Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and intelligence operative Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) fail to hack into its system, Ethan Hunt comes to the rescue and jumps onto the plane, grasping one of its side doors as it takes off. As one would expect from him, it really was Tom Cruise hanging from the plane, with almost no aid from CGI and minimal safety measures. The stunt was so intense that it was heavily featured in all promotional content for the movie, including the main poster.
Curiously, the whole sequence had to be incorporated into the script after director Christopher McQuarrie conjured up the mental image of Mission Impossible's main star dangling from a cargo plane. Tom Cruise, being the athletic daredevil that he's always been, proposed to do the stunt without any green screens or stunt doubles. So, McQuarrie, Cruise, and stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood shot eight different takes, elevating the aircraft to an altitude of around 5,000 feet and slanting it at a more pronounced angle than what a regular cargo aircraft normally would when it takes off. Of course, nobody is strong enough to cling to a plane door at 260 mph. Despite being Tom Cruise's most extreme Mission Impossible stunt, he was actually strapped to a full-body harness which in turn was wired and bolted to the interior of the aircraft.
Still, a stunt at such a high speed could have gone very wrong. It had to be rehearsed a few times beforehand without the star in order to find the right conditions to shoot. The crew made sure that the plane would take off with the ideal weather and with the clearest environment so that the actor could enjoy the smoothest possible flight. Additionally, he had to wear special contact lenses to protect his eyes from wind and debris. After Tom Cruise landed safe and sound for the eighth time, the only remaining thing director Christopher McQuarrie had to do was to edit out the wires and the additional cameras that were attached to the plane.
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation kept the franchise's tradition of upping the ante from the get-go. However, few other franchises keep the audience on the edge of their seat with real-life hazards. All of it is thanks to Tom Cruise, who keeps cheating death onscreen and offscreen with a level of audacity that no other major actor has ever matched.
