Tom Cruise Made the Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning Director Go Out on the Wing of a Plane to Prove a Point About an Impossible Stunt

Needless to say, legendary actor Tom Cruise has really put the “impossible” in Mission: Impossible over the years — but there’s no denying he really upped the ante for the eighth installment of the franchise, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. In fact, Cruise has revealed that M:I 8 director Christopher McQuarrie wanted him to do some actually impossible stunts for the upcoming film, but in order to illustrate how difficult the feat was, he quite literally put McQuarrie up to the trick himself.

"And then we talked about story and [McQuarrie] was like, 'Okay, I want you to go from here to here in a couple of seconds,'" Cruise explained during a recent press conference for the film in Tokyo. "I was like, 'I can't do that.' He's like, 'Okay, well, I want you to do this and this.' I was like, 'I really can't do that.'"

"It was the simplest thing,” McQuarrie added about the particular stunt that tripped Cruise up. “Anything you'd describe, [he'd] say, 'No, you actually can't do that.' And I don't hear 'can't' from him.”

But for Cruise, who has now done a whole host of death-defying stunts on the M:I films over the years, his experience really told him everything he needed to know. "I said, 'Just in terms of the speed, because the force of the air, for me to move quickly on the wing was… You just can't do it,'" the actor insisted, explaining how a “20-minute tutorial” got McQuarrie to understand where he was coming from. "You're limited by the physics of how fast the aircraft is traveling and the force of the wind, that was utterly brutal. So I just said, 'Listen, I think the best thing is if you just do it. Go out, sit in the airplane, go out on the wing, and feel it. Feel the pressure. So, here I am, training him."

McQuarrie, it turns out, loved the experience. "It was great, actually," he said. "Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I would definitely do it again." Cruise also explained during the conference that he’d been training for this stunt for years, and that much of getting it to work came down to choosing the right aircraft.

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning will have its world premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which takes place from May 13 to May 24, 2025. After that, the movie will stunt its way into theaters worldwide on May 23, 2025.

Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.