© 2018 Paramount Pictures(NEW YORK) — With Tom Cruise starting to match Jackie Chan’s bone-breaking legacy of performing his own death-defying stunts, it’s safe to say his Mission: Impossible — Fallout co-stars didn’t want to let their doubles take their falls.
Henry Cavill was more than game, he tells ABC Radio, and made it known to writer/director Christopher McQuarrie and the stunt coordinators straightaway. “Actually, coming onto this job I was excited for the opportunity to do as much as I possibly could, and so I said to them, ‘Look guys: anything I’m allowed to do legally which won’t kill anyone else if I mess up, can we just assume that I’m saying yes to it?'”
He got the sense that the stunt team hears that kind of thing a lot, however.
“They went, ‘Yeah, yeah sure,’ thinking, ‘Yeah, whatever — that’s rubbish.’ And then they learned throughout the shoot that I was actually …willing to do it all. And so, yeah: they put me in nigh upon everything — apart from the one stunt which I probably would have killed everyone in.”
That stunt? Cruise’s HALO jump — the High Altitude Low Opening skydive. It took a specially-trained Cruise and diving cameramen more than 100 jumps to get the shot just right — from an altitude of 25,000 feet. By comparison, most skydivers leap from around 12,000 feet.
Cavill told Good Morning America he was jealous. “I was praying…they would let me do it, begging Tom…Tom eventually said to me, ‘Look, Henry, I understand what you’re saying, I would love, love, love for you to do it, but if you do, the chances are that you will kill me and everyone else in the process!'”
Mission: Impossible — Fallout is currently the number one movie in America.
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