Tom Cruise has made it his personal mission to make any thrilling action scene
look possible, by doing it all himself.
And in the fifth
installment of Mission: Impossible, the 52-year-old actor wasn't going to let
someone else step in when he went 5,000ft above the British countryside for
his latest incredible movie stunt.
The Hollywood actor surpassed
himself when he put himself in grave danger, hanging from the side of an
Airbus A400M in a full tailored suit in character as Ethan Hunt, while the
aircraft flew over the UK.
Tom, who's scaled the world's tallest building and free climbed
Colorado's 2,000ft canyons for the Mission Impossible movie franchise, was
once again going solo on the death-defying stunt.
The action lover
put his life on the line as he took to the skies; using just the side of the
aircraft to help maintain his horizontal positioning while the plane glided
over the British landscape.
He was hanging from the door of the
aircraft on two safety harnesses but used the fixtures on the four engine
military vehicle to grip with both hands.
And the 5ft 6" actor spared himself the protective clothing,
dressing as Ethan in a charcoal slim fit suit that gave him limited movement
and scaling the moving airbus in just brown brogues to offer him minimal
grip.
Mission Impossible 5, directed by Christopher McQuarrie, sees
Tom reprise his role as Ethan, a Field Agent for secret agency Impossible
Mission Force, for a fifth time.
The fourth installment Mission:
Impossible - Ghost Protocol was released in December 2011 and grossed more
than $700million at the box office worldwide.
And the follow up is sure to be an exciting one as Tom was
straight up to heights of 5,000ft on what was to be a clear day for flying in
the rural UK location.
Tom - famous for action hero roles in movies
such as Roy Miller in Knight And Day and Maverick in cult classic Top Gun -
was shown the ropes by a double wearing his identical suit and an engineer
wearing a boiler suit.
But the stunt pro didn't need much
convincing when it came to doing it himself, in what was to be his most
ambitious stunt to date.
When Tom scaled the Burj Khalifa in Dubai
for the movie's prequel Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, he described the
experience as a 'learning on the job' approach, in conversation with Total
Film.
He said: 'I literally had to figure a way to fly because even with
months of training, I didn’t anticipate the crosswinds you get when you’re up
that high.
'Once I figured out how to use my feet as rudders
and got the spatial awareness, we got the shots we wanted.'
Not
short of its action packed scenes, the fourth installment of the Mission
Impossible box set, also saw the father of three free run across moving
vehicles and mount a moving car in the grips of a desert sand storm.
The fourth Mission Impossible film was Cruise's biggest commercial
success to date - a film that came after his personal struggles with a divorce
from estranged wife Katie Holmes, with whom he has daughter Suri Cruise,
eight.
He has previously been married to actresses Nicole Kidman (who he
had two children with, Isabella Jane Cruise and Connor Cruise) as well as Mimi
Rogers.
Tom was recently romantically linked to Mean Girls actress
Lindsay Lohan - who is also in the UK for a West End role in Speed-The-Plow -
but representatives later denied claims that the pair were 'secretly dating'
after exchanging numbers at London hotspot The Chiltern Firehouse in early
October this year.
Besides Great Britain, the New York native has
also been filming in Monaco, Austria and Morocco alongside stunt co-ordinator
Wade Eastwood, who ensures that all of Tom's daredevil scenes are filmed with
the Academy Award winning actor's safety in mind.
On set, a stunt man appears to demonstrate the thrilling sequence
ahead of Tom's efforts, though he doesn't dress in Ethan's costume, suggesting
the scenes wouldn't be used for the film.
Tom once said that he
'didn't get scared' when it came to performing his own stunts and said that it
was part of him doing the character justice.
Talking to British
television host Graham Norton in 2012, the actor admitted: 'People do say no,
but as an actor you bring everything, physically and emotionally, to a
character.
'I’m able to do them (stunts). I’ve trained for 30 years doing
things like that. I don’t get scared. It’s quite technical but sometimes
things go wrong.'
Tom has also played emotive and comedic roles in
Rain Man and Jerry Maguire, but from the start of his Hollywood career, Tom's
characater choices have been predominantly action heroes.
