did tom cruise experience 10 g

For 'Top Gun: Maverick,' Tom Cruise flew a jet, experienced up to 8 G's: 'You can't act that'

Tom Cruise is no slacker when it comes to doing his own action movie stunts . But does he really need to be flying his own fighter jet as six cameras record his every move inside of the cockpit for a film?

Yes, absolutely he does!

And that's what the star, and some of his cast mates, have done for "Top Gun: Maverick," the highly anticipated sequel that arrives 34 years after the original. 

In a featurette for the movie released Wednesday, Cruise defends his decision to eschew CGI for actually piloting a jet. "You can't act that, the distortion in the face. They’re pulling 7½, 8 G's. That’s 1,600 pounds of force," he says.

So it's no surprise that the video shows actor Danny Ramirez nearly vomiting in the cockpit.

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"It is heavy duty," says Cruise. No kidding.

Adds new co-star Miles Teller, who plays Goose's son, "Rooster": "Putting us up in these jets, it's very serious. That's why everybody thought it would be impossible. I think when Tom hears that something's impossible or it can't be done, that’s when he gets to work." 

Trailer: Tom Cruise is training the next generation in new 'Top Gun: Maverick' sequel

In "Top Gun: Maverick," Cruise's character, Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, is a test pilot who finds himself training a detachment of Top Gun graduates for a specialized mission, "the likes of which no pilot has ever seen," according to a release from Paramount.

But Cruise, 57, seems up for the challenge of acting as the leader for such a mission. Even if it makes him woozy and out of breath, as we see in the new promo clip.

"Top Gun: Maverick" is set for theaters in June.

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Could You Take 8 G's? How Tom Cruise Prepared the Cast of 'Top Gun: Maverick' for Flight

Acting while 1,600 pounds of pressure pushes down on your body is not an easy experience. .

Tom Cruise is known for his commitment to practical stunts , so it’s no surprise that he wanted the actors in Top Gun: Maverick to deliver their lines from the cockpits of F/A-18 Super Hornets that were in flight. 

In a featurette for the film, Cruise states that he “wasn’t ready to make a sequel until we had a special story worthy of a sequel and until the technology evolved so we could delve deeper into the experience of a fighter pilot.” The issue is that without proper preparation, the g-forces exerted on the body by the acceleration can result in illness or a dangerous loss of consciousness mid-flight. 

While director Joseph Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda worked with the Navy to find a way to capture the pilots in flight , Cruise worked with the Navy and Top Gun pilots to prepare the cast for what they were going to experience when it came time to press record.

Check out this featurette that highlights moments of the cast's training program.

Learning to "fly"

Lewis Pullman, who plays Lt. Robert “Bob” Floyd, told the Daily News that Cruise’s training regime condensed two years of flight training into three months, covering everything Cruise wished he’d been taught on the original Top Gun. While the Navy trained the actors on how to survive in the water if they were to eject from the jet, Cruise knew the real challenge was preparing the cast for the g-force . 

The rigorous training program introduced the cast to different jets and instructors as they learned to fly and slowly built up their g-force tolerance. Each day, forms were filled out and sent to Cruise to review until the cast was ready for real Navy pilots to take them up in F/A-18s equipped with six IMAX-quality cameras. 

Pullman admits to The Ringer that the cast thought no one was reading the forms they filled out every day. “But whenever we saw Tom, he would come up to us and say, ‘Hey man, I saw that on your last flight you had a little trouble pulling zero g’s. Here’s what I do.’ It was like, ‘Holy smokes, Tom Cruise is taking the time out of his jam-packed day to give me personal tips.”

The skill of being able to withstand up to eight g’s, or around 1,600 pounds of pressure, was useful as the 60 to 70 minutes of acting in the sky translated to a mere minute of usable footage .

“Every time we went up there you have to mentally brace for a fight,” Glenn Powell, who plays Lt. Jake “Hangman” Seresin, said at CinemaCon . “You get on the ground and you’re exhausted. That’s what’s impressive about Tom. He’s flying more than anyone in the movie—he would fly three times a day.”

“Nothing bonds a cast together more than collective suffering,” Miles Teller, who plays Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, said in the Cannes production notes for Top Gun: Maveric k. “I think, when you’re going through something and you know how tough it is yourself, and you look to the left of you and the right of you and you see that person going through it, it kind of pushes you a little harder and further than you would normally go. It’s so unique for us that we will only be able to talk about this with each other for the rest of our lives.”

Not only did the actors have to prepare themselves for the unimaginable pressure of the g’s, they learned how to direct themselves, becoming pseudo-cinematographers while in the sky. Each flight was incredibly important, which is why Cruise’s training program also included minute-by-minute rehearsals with a pilot in a fake plane so that actors could pan when to say their lines. 

Nobody thought it would be possible to have actors performing in real jets, capturing the real intensity of being a fighter pilot. All of the training prepared the cast to fly and perform at the same time, creating the most memorable aerial sequences in modern cinema. 

If there is one thing we can learn from Crusie, it’s that the creative vision can be brought to life with patience and dedication to the cast and crew. While the visuals are stunning, the cast and crew need to be safe and physically and mentally prepared for what they are going to do. Communicating and working with each of his co-stars allowed Crusie to bring his vision for the sequel to life, pushing the boundaries of what everyone thought was possible. 

It’s truly a sight worth watching on the largest screen possible.

Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Choosing Your Next Project & Immediate Next Steps

“the best part about this cycle is you’re always cultivating, and you’re always getting better at it.”.

There's no better feeling than completing a project you’ve been working on for, what feels like, forever. On one hand, you’re relieved but you're also anxious to figure out what to work on next. How do you decide what your new project will be, and what is the most efficient strategy for getting started on it?

In today’s episode, No Film School’s GG Hawkins and Jason Hellerman discuss:

• The first questions you need to ask yourself before deciding on your next project
• Doing market research and getting feedback on your initial ideas
• Narrowing down on your ideas
• Writing with specific actors and directors in mind
• Developing relationships and keeping track of your interactions
• The draft-writing process
• Setting parameters for the people who will read your first drafts
• Being selective about who will receive your final spec
• Why you should give yourself time off
• Oscar-Winning Screenwriter Eric Roth Takes You on a Tour of His Writing Process

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This episode of The No Film School Podcast was produced by GG Hawkins .

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Tom Cruise's need for speed returns in Top Gun: Maverick , and the movie features an incredible amount of real stunts and flying instead of fully Top Gun: Maverick CGI scenes. Over 30 years after he originally played Pete "Maverick" Mitchell in 1986's Top Gun , the release of the sequel comes at a point in time where Cruise has reinvented his Hollywood persona. Once it finally came time to make Top Gun: Maverick , one of the biggest questions surrounding the film was just how far Cruise's long-awaited sequel would go to make everything as real as possible. The original Top Gun featured great dogfights in the skies, and director Tony Scott captured much of the action in real life by using professional pilots.

The film easily could have tried to replicate the Top Gun dogfights by relying heavily on the advancements in visual effects over the last 36 years. However, the minimal Top Gun: Maverick CGI used to create its aerial scenes is unsurprising — with Tom Cruise leading the charge, Paramount went all-in on keeping up with the star and producer's penchant for realistic action scenes. As the movie follows Maverick as he trains a group of young pilots — led by Goose's son Rooster (Miles Teller) and his rival Hangman (Glen Powell) — Top Gun 2 is filled with thrilling flight sequences that were accomplished mostly through practical effects. Here is what is known about which parts of Top Gun: Maverick are real and what was achieved with special effects.

Does Tom Cruise Really Fly In Top Gun 2?

Tom Cruise does fly a plane for real in Top Gun: Maverick . The actor got his pilot's license in the years after Top Gun was released in 1986, so it was one of his mandates to make a sequel that he'd get to fly a real fighter jet in the sequel. While Maverick is often seen flying in a Boeing F/A 18F Super Hornet jet and the fictional Hypersonic "Darkstar" jet, Cruise was not in control of either aircraft.

Tom Cruise flew backseat in these real planes with another pilot, experiencing incredible g-force and flying at high speeds, but he was not piloting them for the most part. Although Cruise is a licensed pilot, the limits of his skills, insurance, and military regulations meant that another Navy pilot needed to be in command of these planes. Otherwise, there's not much Top Gun: Maverick CGI to speak of.

While Tom Cruise does really fly in several jets for Top Gun 2 , he also was given the chance to pilot one for real. The sequence comes during Top Gun: Maverick 's ending after Pete is reunited with Penny (Jennifer Connelly). He takes her for a flight in his rebuilt P-51 propeller plane, and this was the one instance where Tom Cruise was actually serving as the pilot. The P-51 Mustang used in Top Gun: Maverick is owned by Tom Cruise in real life, which allowed him to really fly it for the film's conclusion.

Do Top Gun: Maverick's Other Cast Members Really Fly?

The Top Gun: Maverick CGI use was minimal, and since most of Top Gun 2 was real the other cast members also flew in their jets just like Cruise. However, none of the Top Gun: Maverick cast flew the jets by themselves. All the cast member's jets were piloted by trained Navy pilots for their aerial sequences. Even though flying in a plane as a passenger might sound a bit easy, it required significant training from the cast.

Tom Cruise developed a three-month, intensive training program for Miles Teller's Rooster and his co-stars that they had to go through prior to filming beginning. This included various tests and physical training meant to prepare them to be in a real F/A 18 Super Hornet for production. All the Top Gun: Maverick cast members who had to be in a jet for the movie participated in the grueling process, which ended with them being more than ready for the real experience.

Beyond the flight training, capturing Top Gun: Maverick 's aerial sequences meant the cast members essentially became their own crew and cinematographer. A typical day on set when flying was involved saw the individual actors leave for an hour or two at a time and film their aerial scenes. However, director Joseph Kosinski couldn't communicate with them during this time or see the footage that was being filmed inside Top Gun 2 's fighter jets . So the crew of the sequel invented new camera rigs to go inside the cockpit with the actors, which required them to properly frame and light the shots. Their only aid during this time was the real pilots in the cockpit with them, but they were focused on flying the jets.

How Much Of Top Gun: Maverick Is CGI?

Putting the cast in real flying scenes doesn't mean that everything in Top Gun: Maverick was done practically. The movie certainly thrives on the realism created by these believable sequences, but visual effects were used in other ways. One area that seems to be partially aided by Top Gun: Maverick CGI is the dogfights, as the missiles launching and bullets shooting at the planes are surely fake.

Doing any of that practically would put the actors, real pilots, and crew in great danger. With that in mind, it also seems that the bombing of the underground uranium facility belonging to Top Gun: Maverick 's villains was aided by CGI. There are surely other smaller examples of visual effects being used in Top Gun: Maverick , but it was all done to service the real aerial sequences happening throughout the rest of the film.

Why Top Gun 2 Uses Practical Stunts Rather Than CGI

Beyond Tom Cruise's thrill-seeking persona, Top Gun: Maverick uses practical stunts rather than Top Gun: Maverick CGI to give viewers a more believable experience. Everyone involved with the movie agreed that it would be far too noticeable if the actors were faking what it felt like to experience almost 10-gs of force, traveling at over 600 knots, and everything else that comes with actually being in a fighter jet.

This wasn't the easy route to take by any measure, as Top Gun 2 could've played it safe by placing the actors in front of green screens and inside fake cockpits to tackle its aerial sequences. But Tom Cruise's history of real stunts meant this shortcut was incredibly unlikely. Doing the flying practically brings an even greater sense of danger to Top Gun: Maverick — on top of it just looking incredible — as audiences can clearly see what the actors endured to deliver these mesmerizing action scenes.

How The Top Gun: Maverick Stunts Were Filmed

Top Gun: Maverick 's stunts were filmed through real U.S. Navy pilots taking actors on top-of-the-line fighter jets. They were followed by three different aircraft mounted with specialized cameras that can withstand the G-forces involved. This includes a helicopter, a specialized jet equipped with two different lens focal lengths for doubling the footage on one run, and a custom camera drone plane that can withstand up to 3 Gs, developed by Top Gun: Maverick aerial coordinator Kevin LaRosa.

While LaRosa dodged trees and other aircraft on the controls, it was aerial unit director of photography Michael FitzMaurice's job to ensure that they had the shot. The Top Gun: Maverick cast , after training with Tom Cruise, became well-equipped at withstanding the same G-forces that threatened to break the crew's highly-specialized gear. As director Joseph Kosinski said in interview ( via The New York Times) " You can’t fake the forces that are put on your body during combat... You can’t do it on a sound stage, you can’t do it on a blue screen. You can’t do it with visual effects."

Top Gun: Maverick's breathtaking stunts were made possible mainly by two factors: the extreme dedication of its actors and the extensive experience and expertise of the entire film crew. Indeed, Kosinki even reportedly spent around 15 months developing and installing cameras in the F-18s used in the movie, working with Navy officers who were huge fans of the original Top Gun . Considering the massive, record-breaking box office success of the sequel, the incredible dedication that even allowed the stunt-heavy movie to be captured in the first place, and how audiences have been clamoring for Top Gun 3 , Top Gun: Maverick is definitely just the beginning of this promising franchise's long-awaited comeback.

How Much Top Gun 2's Real Stunts Cost

The budget for Top Gun: Maverick was exceptionally high, and often using real stunts versus a Top Gun: Maverick CGI stunt ended up costing more money. The final budget for Top Gun: Maverick was $171 million, and thankfully the film's box office made it the biggest movie of 2022, more than making up for any money lost. The exact amount spent on aerial stunts isn't known, but is assuredly astronomical.

According to a report by Bloomberg , the U.S. Navy charged production a whopping $11,374 per hour to access the F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets. Cruise flew none of these planes, as the Pentagon bars anyone outside of the U.S. Military from using their jets. However, he did fly plenty of other planes in the movie. Either way, Top Gun: Maverick had a massive budget , and while it wasn't used towards CGI, plenty was definitely put toward the F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets.

Tom Cruise Wouldn't Have Done Top Gun 2 Without Real Jets

Top Gun: Maverick was a successful return to form for both the Top Gun IP and Tom Cruise in 2022, and the incredible use of real stunts and jets over CGI was partially responsible. However, it seems from past interviews with Tom Cruise that the Top Gun sequel couldn't have happened any other way. Speaking to Extra all the way back in 2015, Cruise was adamant that a then-hypothetical Top Gun 2 wouldn't have his blessing if it opted for CGI over real jets.

"If I can figure it out, if all of us can figure it out, it’d be fun to do, I’d like to fly those jets again, but we got to do all the jets practical, no CGI on the jets,” Cruise said at the time when asked if he'd return to Top Gun, “I’m saying right now no CGI on the jets. If we can figure all that out, and the Department of Defense will allow us to do it, that would be fun. ” Clearly, Tom Cruise got his wish, as in 2022 Top Gun: Maverick emerged, completed with minimal CGI and the real jets he'd dreamed of flying again in 2015.

• Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

How 'Top Gun: Maverick' Pulled Off All That High-Flying Footage

The film uses real airplanes and real pilots, and that’s really Tom Cruise pulling Gs.

The makers of “Top Gun: Maverick” have released a new video showing how all of the amazing flying footage was taken. What's amazing is that in this age of computer-generated special effects, nearly all of the airplane flying in the upcoming sequel is real—except for one scene.

The Navy also allowed filmmakers to place six “IMAX-quality” cameras in the rear cockpit seat of an F/A-18F, the two-seater version of the Super Hornet. This is how the film captures the illusion of Tom Cruise and other stars of the film actually flying the plane. The actors are actually in the plane, just sitting in the back seat while the real pilot is in the front seat.

One interesting clip is footage of a Super Hornet flying what appears to be a series of forested valleys. This could be a part of VR-1251, a designated flight route from the Pacific Ocean through Northern California, then Oregon, then ending at Naval Air Station Fallon in northern Nevada. Here’s a video of an actual Super Hornet pilot flying the route:

This makes sense since at least some of the movie appears to take place at NAS Fallon. Fallon describes itself as the Navy’s “premier tactical air warfare training center.” A major base, dozens of Navy strike fighters—including aircraft painted in camouflage brown and blue aggressor paint schemes— are visible from Google Maps at any particular time .

Fallon is home to the “Fighting Saints” of Fighter Squadron Composite 13 , or VFC-13. VFC provides aggressor pilots to fly against Navy fighter pilots, providing an adversary force for air-to-air combat training. Although they’re not in the trailers, we’re likely to see their camouflaged planes in the film at some point.

One scene that appears to have been filmed and then altered with CGI is the shovel-nosed SR-71-like aircraft Tom Cruise flies in the second trailer . In the Paramount video, it’s clear the scene is shot with a Super Hornet flying low over the camera crew. This was apparently changed in production to a mysterious, high speed airplane. So there’s at least a little bit of CGI in the film, but the great majority of Top Gun: Maverick 's flying footage appears gloriously real.

Source: The Aviationist

Kyle Mizokami is a writer on defense and security issues and has been at Popular Mechanics since 2015. If it involves explosions or projectiles, he's generally in favor of it. Kyle’s articles have appeared at The Daily Beast, U.S. Naval Institute News, The Diplomat, Foreign Policy, Combat Aircraft Monthly, VICE News , and others. He lives in San Francisco.

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Tom Cruise goes hypersonic in new Top Gun movie, but doing it in real life is a challenge

Bob mcdonald's blog: real life hypersonic flight innovation gives credence to the movie's fictional plane.

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The opening sequence of the blockbuster film Top Gun: Maverick depicts Tom Cruise piloting a futuristic aircraft up to Mach 10, or ten times the speed of sound. In reality, decades of research has only brought us to hypersonic speeds in excess of Mach 5.

But now a private company has announced plans for a new hypersonic aircraft they hope to test in the next couple of years, called the Stratolaunch Talon-A .

When it comes to flight, going faster comes with costs. The faster an aircraft travels, the more air resistance it faces, requiring more thrust and more fuel. Above about 1,200 km/hr, depending on altitude, the air compresses so much there's a sudden increase in aerodynamic drag — the famous sound barrier.

While rocket-powered missiles and missile-like space vehicles routinely achieve supersonic or hypersonic speeds, achieving controlled flight with those speeds in a winged airplane has been a more difficult task.

Chuck Yeager flew a specially developed rocket plane, the Bell X-1, to break the sound barrier in 1947. A series of ever-faster experimental supersonic X-planes followed, culminating with the famous X-15 rocket-plane that first flew in 1959. It inaugurated the era of hypersonic flight by ultimately reaching Mach 6.7 on flights that touched the edge of space.  

In 2004, NASA flew the X-43A hypersonic test aircraft up to Mach 9.6. This unpiloted test aircraft was initially boosted by a rocket, and then fired up its "scramjet" engine — a special type of high-performance jet engine. The X-43A holds the record for an air-breathing aircraft, which means that the engine takes in air from the atmosphere to help burn its fuel. 

However, the hypersonic portion of its flights lasted only about ten seconds: it turns out that keeping an engine running at that speed is very challenging. 

In the new Top Gun film, Cruise flies a hypersonic plane called the Darkstar. This fictional aircraft may have been inspired by plans for a hypersonic military plane called the SR-72, or "Son of Blackbird." 

The original 1960s Blackbird was the A-12 reconnaissance plane and it evolved into the larger legendary SR-71 with room for two passengers and more fuel.

The SR-71 was capable of Mach 3 flight. Its manufacturer, Lockheed (now Lockheed-Martin), has made announcements about developing an unmanned hypersonic spy plane that would be a successor to the SR-71 for about a decade. Secrecy surrounds the SR-72, which is currently in development, but it is intended to fly at Mach 6, twice the speed of the Blackbird. 

So the aircraft shown in Top Gun , a plane that can take off from the ground and fly up to Mach 10, was all a computer-generated fantasy.

But a new hypersonic aircraft called Talon-A could make the fantasy real. It was announced by Stratolaunch, a Mojave, Calif. company that also built the world's largest aircraft, a carrier called the Roc. The enormous Roc will serve as a mothership to lift the Talon-A into the air. 

Talon-A is an unmanned vehicle designed to test the aerodynamics and materials for hypersonic flight. The first version, which the company says is complete, won't be hypersonic — in fact, it won't even be powered. It's meant to test the structure that carries the smaller plane under the Roc's wing, and how it affects the flight of the carrier aircraft. It will also be dropped from altitude to test its glide and landing characteristics. 

Future versions of the Talon-A, which the company says are under construction, will be equipped with a rocket engine. That engine will be fired when the Talon-A is released from the mother ship at 35,000 feet, where, according to plans, it should accelerate to Mach 6. So it seems much of the hard work of developing this aircraft remains to be to be done. 

Hypersonic flight has been a goal in aviation for decades but the challenges are immense, not just because of the amount of power needed, but also the heating effect of the air, which can raise skin temperatures on the aircraft above what conventional materials can withstand. A lot of research will be focused on finding the right composites that can take the heat.

The long-term dream is for hypersonic aircraft that could take passengers halfway around the world in a half an hour.

But the more likely application will be for the military, who want aircraft that fly high and fast for reconnaissance, getting in and out of enemy territory without being caught. Hypersonic aircraft could also provide easy access to space, with the ability to take off from any major runway and return to land at the same airport, which is much simpler than complicated rocket launches. 

Going fast has been an obsession for humans since Roman chariot races. Now that need for speed continues through the air. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob McDonald is the host of CBC Radio's award-winning weekly science program, Quirks & Quarks. He is also a science commentator for CBC News Network and CBC TV's The National. He has received 12 honorary degrees and is an Officer of the Order of Canada.

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Top Gun 2 behind the scenes footage shows Tom Cruise hitting ‘8Gs’ in an F-18 fighter jet

Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer of the long-awaited “Top Gun” sequel, “Top Gun: Maverick,” wanted to his film to be a “love letter to aviation” –  and as a result actor Tom Cruise and other cast members took on the real G-forces their characters would endure behind the controls of an F-18 Hornet.

In a new trailer for the film, released by Paramount Pictures, Bruckheimer said “we’re going to show you what it’s really like to be a Top Gun pilot.”

“You just can’t create this kind of experience unless you shoot it live,” Cruise said.

Cruise –  who is reprising his 1986 role as the sequel’s titular character Navy pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell –  described working with real pilots to perform the real-life shots.

Cruise reportedly caused a delay in the production of the sequel in order to get certified to fly fighter jets . A source for the film production told The Sun that Cruise would fly for some, but not all of the scenes.

“The producers would prefer not to put their leading man, not to mention their whole film, at risk. They also wouldn’t choose to have their long-awaited sequel delayed nearly a year, but despite the huge insurance costs, they are willing to do what it takes to ensure Tom is happy,” the source said.

Bruckheimer himself credited Cruise for motivating other members of the cast to perform inside a real fighter jet cockpit.

“It’s amazing what we see in the cockpit and what an audience is going to experience,” he said.

The film crew was able to get a six brand new camera system to capture Imax quality footage inside the cockpit of a Navy fighter jet.

“You can’t act that, the distortion of the face,” Cruise said, describing the conditions. “They’re pulling seven and a half, eight Gs. That’s 1600 pounds of force.”

Several of the actors can be seen throughout the trailer, passing out under the intense force, or trying to hold back vomit. Cruise himself can be seen towards the end of the trailer, trying to cope with a tight turn.

“Putting us up in these jets is very serious; that’s why everybody thought it would be impossible,” said actor Miles Teller, who is playing the son of the first film’s character, Goose. “I think when Tom [Cruise] here’s that it’s impossible or it can’t be done, that’s when he gets to work.”

The new film also included filming on location aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier .

The latest behind-the-scenes trailer comes just days after the release of a second cinematic trailer for the new film .

“Top Gun: Maverick” is set for a June 2020 release.

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NEWS... BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT

Tom Cruise reveals how the amazing flight stunts in Top Gun: Maverick were shot

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Top Gun : Maverick is a ‘barrier-breaking sequel’ whose real-life jet-flying scenes will, ahem, ‘take your breath away’, according to rave reviews. But just how real is real?

Fans had demanded a sequel to the 1986 classic for decades but star Tom Cruise had held off until the studio could meet his non-negotiable requirement.

‘If I’m ever going to entertain this, we’re shooting everything practically,’ Cruise told them. ‘I’m in that F/A-18 [jet], period. So we’re going to have to develop camera rigs. There’s going to be wind tunnels and engineering. It’s going to take a long, long time for me to figure it out.’

Then came the small matter of convincing the US Navy to let them shoot a film live in $67.4 million military jets. Initially the Navy was resistant – couldn’t the studio just use CGI special effects like everyone else?

But Cruise was determined. Every time you see an actor in an aeroplane in Top Gun: Maverick, there is an actor in an aeroplane.

The only visual effects used were for manoeuvres involving safety considerations.

‘There will be speculation that, “well, there was no way an actor was in that airplane at 50ft inverted, going over the ridge at 580mph at seven Gs.” But there was!’ confirms the US Navy’s technical adviser for the film, Captain Brian Ferguson.

That was fine for Cruise, an experienced pilot who flies warbirds for fun (the vintage silver Red Tail plane Cruise flies with Jennifer Connelly in the movie is actually his), but he then had to enlist and train his young cast to fly planes.

‘You had to sign a paper basically saying you weren’t afraid to fly,’ Danny Ramirez, who plays new character Fanboy, said. ‘And I was like “Well, I’m definitely terrified of being in the air, but I can’t pass this up.”’

‘I wouldn’t let an actor walk my dog, let alone fly a plane,’ Miles Teller, who plays the son of Top Gun character Goose, has joked. ‘Everybody thought it would be impossible and that’s what drove it.’

Cruise created an intense five-month aviation programme for his cast, complete with daily targets. Each evening they had to record their progress so Cruise could adjust their training.

‘I read every form, every night,’ Cruise has attested.

It was all necessary. The cast had to withstand extreme G-force without throwing up or blacking out. The G-force distortion of the actors’ faces is unfaked.

More than that, they were required to act under those conditions, with no margin for error.

The US Navy was keen to collaborate – after all, the original Top Gun boosted recruitment by 500% in the year after the movie’s release.

But it’s not like Hollywood had them at their beck and call. Time in the air was limited and if they looked through the rushes and realised the lighting or make-up wasn’t right or the actors fluffed lines, it’s not like popping back up to do reshoots was an option.

Each flight demanded hours of briefing. Ground-to-air units shot simultaneously and there were days where 27 cameras were constantly deployed to ensure full coverage.

So where to go from here? With Cruise collaborating with Elon Musk and Nasa on a movie that will be shot in space, the only way is up, up, up.

Top Gun: Maverick is out in cinemas on Friday.

MORE : Top Gun: Maverick cast praise sequel’s ‘awesome’ diversity: ‘It was great to see folks who look like you’

MORE : Tom Cruise opens up on powerful reunion with Val Kilmer in Top Gun: Maverick after going head-to-head with Iceman in original film

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How Tom Cruise and Miles Teller Pulled Off Those Insane Stunts in Top Gun: Maverick

By Jack King

According to the aviation website Aerocorner , in today's money, a Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet — the fighter jet du jour used by the U.S. Navy since 1995 — costs the American government $67.4 million. That isn't a bulk deal, folks: it's per plane. It should come as no surprise to anyone with a sliver of critical thought, then, that Tom Cruise , Miles Teller and Co. didn't actually pilot the vehicles we see in Top Gun: Maverick .

“But it looks real!” Yeah, it does. That's movie magic, baby.

Nevertheless, Tom Cruise knew from experience on the first Top Gun just how physically taxing the face-melting forces of extreme flight can be: on his debut test run, rocketing up to double the speed of launching astronauts, he hurled inside his oxygen mask. While they might not have actually hit the throttle and handled the joysticks, Cruise did insist that they actually go up into the air, albeit as passengers, not pilots.

Ergo, he put the ensemble of Top Gun candidates through an intensive training course in the run-up to production. Going from smaller prop planes to, eventually, actual F-18s — loaned to the filmmakers by the Department of Defence for a measly $11,000 an hour — they learned not to fly the things, but how best to mitigate the ill effects of jet flight. In part, this was a three-month boot camp to avoid air sickness en masse.

But it worked: “There was never a time on Top Gun: Maverick where we had to delay or stop filming because somebody felt sick,” says Kevin LaRosa II, the movie's aerial stunt coordinator. Sitting down with LaRosa for just under an hour, we got all the goss from the making of the Top Gun sequel.

"We had what I like to call rules on Top Gun: Maverick as far as aerials were concerned. And the first and foremost rule, it all had to be real. However: not every aircraft we used in the movie is readily available in the United States, or they're not flyable here, and we show their aircraft flying.

“So here's the other rule: there has to be an aircraft in front of the lens, but a subject [stand-in] aircraft could be used — like another F-18. And then visual effects comes in, they tweak or retexture it to look like a different aircraft. [See: the ambiguously-defined ”fifth-generation jets" the equally nebulous bad guys fly.]

“But the beauty of that is the audience should know that there really is an aircraft out there — the vapour's going to be real, the flight dynamics are going to be real, it's simply a digital reskin of a real fighter. When it came to VFX plane shots? Always a real aircraft.”

"Our cast had to be in the aircraft for every shot. So when they're delivering those epic performances, they are really in there pulling those Gs. Production went to great lengths to design that in-cockpit IMAX camera set up so those actors could be in there, doing that.

"This was a process that was built in and heavily driven by Tom Cruise. They had me build the training programme: we started them in Cessna 172s — my father and I were actually the first cast flight instructors — and those little single-engine aeroplanes are entry-level aircraft that anyone would learn to fly.

"This gave the actors spatial orientation, and an understanding of what flying was all about, where to look where, where to move their hands, what all of the gauges do, the basic things. How to turn, land, takeoff.

"We graduated from there to an aircraft called the Extra 300. Their new instructor there was Chuck Coleman, a great friend of mine — again, this is all being heavily monitored by Tom Cruise every day, every step of the way. [Cruise earned his pilot license in the mid ‘90s.]

"This is the aircraft the general public would’ve seen in Red Bull Air Races or other stunt shows. It's a single-engine, piston-driven aeroplane that's extremely manoeuvrable and capable of pulling a lot of Gs. This part was to build up their G tolerance.

"From there, we moved on to the L-39 Albatross, a Czechoslovakian fighter trainer jet imported to the US — it's readily available, very manoeuvrable, very fun. And this was for the cast to learn how to pull heavy Gs. By the time they graduated from this one, and got into the F-18s, they were seasoned pros.

“This process lasted for three months, all in parts of Southern and Central California. That's why even for a guy like me, who can watch something and pick it apart, I watched Top Gun: Maverick and it looks like they're real naval aviators.”

"The Cinejet platform is something that I dreamt up: I needed a camera platform that would match the story quality of Top Gun: Maverick , something that'd really let us get in there, into the dogfights and canyon runs, really put the audience through a thrill ride.

"I was struggling to find the right platform and, again, I landed on the L-39 Albatros. I put a picture of a camera gimbal over the nose of the jet — in an old programme called Microsoft Paint — and said, you know what, that's it. We had to work with the manufacturers to make it a reality but, a year later, the L-39 Cinejet was a real thing.

"Previous jet-based platforms worked with partially stabilised camera technology, meaning that if I'm flying that aircraft, and I rock my wings at all, it could disturb the shot. It was a lot harder for the aerial director of photography, or the camera operators sitting in the back of the jet — they'd have to stabilise my movements, which is very difficult to do.

“With the Cinejet, the gimbal is fully stabilised. It doesn't matter what I do while I'm flying, that thing's gonna be rock steady. Now you can get very aggressive, really get the camera in there so we're shoving the audience in the face of these afterburners.”

"We were working with F/A-18 F Models, which are two-seat F-18s — basically a pilot up front, and typically a weapon system operator in the back seat. They look very, very similar. So we'd have forward-facing cameras over the shoulder of actual naval aviators in the front seat at the controls, and four rear-facing cameras [facing the cast] in the back.

By Ariel LeBeau

By Sophia Benoit

By Oren Hartov

"For the exterior sequences — say when we see Tom flying an F-18, we're enhancing that F-18 with CGI to change it from a two-seat to a single seat. The beauty is that really is a shot of Tom in the back seat of that F-18, so he is there, being piloted by a genuine naval aviator.

"The cast would have an hour and a half to two hours in the morning, and another period in the afternoon, but typically no more than four hours a day. But that's a lot of flying. When you're pulling those days and doing the type of manoeuvres that we were doing, that's a lot.

“Obviously everything in the cockpit needs to be stowed away. They would unzip their flight suit, pull out whatever they need to do their own hair and makeup — you know, spray their face if they needed extra sweat, make sure their mask was centred, their googles were clean.

“Once that was all done they'd stow all that stuff, hit the big red button and start rolling the camera. This is where they became like a [director of photography]: they'd tell their pilots, 'Hey, I need the sun back here at five o'clock, I need a thirty-degree right bank, and I'm gonna hit these lines!'

"Remember, in a jet, you're moving really fast, you're covering a lot of terrain — it's not like you can just get the perfect background and leave it there, you have to hit it, say your line, and come all the way back to get [another take]. By the time we'd get to the debrief, we'd sit there and watch maybe ten takes, and two would be perfect.

“So it's a lot of work — not just sitting there taking a joy ride!”

This story originally ran on   British GQ   with the title  “How Tom Cruise and Miles Teller pulled off those insane, high-flying stunts in Top Gun: Maverick ”

How the ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Cast Trained to Fly Fighter Jets

By Jazz Tangcay

Jazz Tangcay

Artisans Editor

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Audiences coming out of “ Top Gun: Maverick ” this weekend want to know one thing, are the actors really flying those fighter jets? The answer in short is, yes.

Tom Cruise , who returns as “Maverick,” is renowned for doing his own stunt work, and he wanted his stars Miles Teller, Monica Barbaro and Glen Powell to learn how to fly. That’s where the film’s aerial coordinator, Kevin LaRosa Jr. , stepped in.

LaRosa Jr. worked with Cruise to put together an intense flight program that began with the cast flying in a smaller aircraft. “We started with the Cessna 172 and we took them through basic flying. This allowed them to see what it was like to take off, land and know where to look and put their hands,” LaRosa. Jr. explains. That starter plane also allowed the actors to get a feel of what a small g-force felt like.

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And just like in a real training program, once the actors were comfortable with that, they graduated to the next level and it was onto the aerobatic airplane, the Extra 300. “This was similar to what the general public would see at an airshow where those planes do crazy maneuvers. It can pull up to eight g forces. It’s exhilarating,” says LaRosa Jr.

Again, the exercise would build up their G-tolerance. “That to me is almost like muscle memory. If I don’t fly for a long time, I might go up and get sick. But if I fly every day and pull those Gs, it’s almost like brain muscle and you’re going to get used to it, and get better.” He adds, “We built them up to the point where they were mainly not getting sick.”

Next was the L-39 Albatross. “This allowed them to experience a fighter trainer jet. When they graduated from that, we had aviators.” LaRosa Jr. adds some cast members are working on getting their full license. Glen Powell, who plays Hangman, did get his.

By the time the actors were put into F/A-18, LaRosa Jr. says, “They were confident and they felt good. They were used to those G-forces, and then they could focus on working with Joseph and Tom on telling this amazing story.” He continues, “They didn’t have to worry that they were in this high-performance fighter jet flying through canyons.”

As someone who has dedicated his life being an aerial coordinator, flying and teaching, LaRosa Jr. praises the talent of the cast. Barbaro, he says was the most impressive. “She absolutely killed it, and did a good job of adjusting to the physiological effects of everything.”

Equally as impressive was Powell, who got sick while filming the F/A-18 scenes. Says LaRosa Jr., “He would go and take care of his business and then get right back in the game. of the most impressive things was watching how some of the cast were able to process that and recover themselves.”

The training program set the actors up, so when they were ready to fly and film, Cruise’s determination of wanting the best performances possible were delivered.

For the mission training program that the pilots go on, LaRosa Jr. says the jet-to-jet photography allows audiences to go live with the fighter jets while IMAX cameras were mounted to the inside and outside of the F/A-18. “As the audience, it feels like we’re riding in there with them.” LaRosa Jr. adds, “When you mix all of those things together, you end up with the perfect mix of aerial storytelling.  It is a perfect blend of living with our actors who are absolutely in those aircraft, maneuvering and pulling G’s and also letting the audience see where we are to get spatial orientation and to see these aircraft maneuvering down low and in and around the training range.”

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Welcome to Tom Cruise’s Flight School for ‘Top Gun: Maverick’

If there was to be a sequel to the ’80s classic ‘Top Gun,’ it was going to need to be even better than the original—and way more realistic. Before the movie hits theaters, the cast of ‘Maverick’ explains what it took to become on-screen pilots.

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In the middle of shooting Top Gun , producer Jerry Bruckheimer realized he had a huge problem: With the exception of Tom Cruise, all the actors playing Navy pilots kept vomiting in the cockpit. “Their heads were down, and when they got their heads up, their eyes were rolling back,” Bruckheimer says. “It was terrible. They were all sick.”

On a scrappy budget with clunky 1980s technology, an untrained cast, and new studio leadership, filming eventually moved to an L.A. soundstage, where those actors could settle their stomachs while pretending to fly on a gimbal instead. The disrupted, piecemealed experience stuck with Cruise long after—despite the movie’s eventual massive box office success and canonization as a modern classic, the A-list actor had little desire to revive Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. “Originally, I wasn’t interested in doing a sequel,” he told Total Film magazine , at least not until technology—and his castmates—could “put the audience inside that F-18.”

Three decades later, Bruckheimer and director Joseph Kosinski flew to Paris to convince him they could. During a 20-minute break on the set of Mission: Impossible—Fallout , Kosinski pitched a sequel centered on Cruise’s aging fighter pilot and his strained relationship with his best friend Goose’s son. “I wanted it to be a rite-of-passage story for Maverick,” says Kosinski, who tried appealing to his star’s extremist sensibilities by promising to shoot everything practically. The director had seen Navy pilots use GoPros on their flights, documenting a first-person experience above the clouds that was “better than any aerial footage I’d seen from any movie,” he says. “I showed that to [Tom] and said this is available for free on the internet. If we can’t beat this, there’s no point in making this movie—and he agreed.”

Over the next 15 months, Kosinski collaborated with naval advisers and aerospace corporations, building six specialized IMAX cameras for an F-18 cockpit, mapping out highwire action sequences through tight canyons, and developing a specialized “CineJet” with aerial coordinator Kevin LaRosa II to capture it all from the air. “A lot of what we did was cutting-edge,” LaRosa says. “That technology came to fruition as the story came to fruition, and Top Gun: Maverick became a real thing.” At the same time, Cruise started his own preparations, vetting a cast of young pilots—Miles Teller, Glen Powell, Jay Ellis, Monica Barbaro, Greg Tarzan Davis, Lewis Pullman, and Danny Ramirez—before developing a specialized flight training gauntlet so that everyone could conquer the sky. “He knew the goal was to not only get his footage in the plane, but to get them all in the planes,” Kosinski says. “He just wanted them to be prepared, and he knew exactly what it was going to take.”

Leaning on years of his own piloting experience, Cruise put together a detailed aviation curriculum, connecting actors with trusted flight instructors, building up their G-force tolerance to unthinkable levels, and readying their transition into the F-18 cockpit. The result is breathtaking, a collage of immersive, madcap flying sequences and high-octane performances—a testament to Cruise’s unrelenting drive to pack as much thrill-seeking euphoria into Top Gun: Maverick as humanly possible. “He will do whatever it takes to give audiences the ride of a lifetime,” Powell says. “It’s so infectious to be a part of.”

Part 1: “I Never Signed That Waiver.”

Because Top Gun: Maverick would be shot practically, Kosinski and Bruckheimer needed actors who were unafraid to fly and could subject themselves to intensive training. Not everyone who auditioned was truthful right away.

Joseph Kosinski (director): I made it very clear from the very first meeting: We’re going to shoot this for real. This means you’re going in a real F-18 and flying in these scenes. A lot of people tapped out.

Lewis Pullman (Robert “Bob” Floyd): You go to an audition like that and you’re like, “Damn, that would be cool but it’s never going to happen.” Then they said, “We want to sign you up as long as you’re not scared of flying.” I fly all the time commercially—Spirit Airlines, all the greats. They were like, “It might be a little different than that.”

Monica Barbaro (Natasha “Phoenix” Trace): Joe asked me if I was afraid of flying, to which I said, “No”—then he told me that we’d be flying in jets. I got goosebumps.

Greg Tarzan Davis (Javy “Coyote” Machado): I lied to Joe. I was just given a piece of paper for the audition saying, “Are you afraid of flying?” “Are you afraid of heights?” Of course I said, “No.”

Danny Ramirez (Mickey “Fanboy” Garcia): We had to sign a paper before we stepped into the audition room because otherwise I would have lied to him, and that would have started the relationship on the wrong foot.

Glen Powell (Jake “Hangman” Seresin): I keep hearing all the other guys talk about signing a waiver that you were not afraid of flying. I never signed that waiver.

Pullman: It kind of snuck up on me what we were really doing. They were like, “You’re going to actually fly in these planes.”

Ramirez: I was absolutely terrified whenever I was on commercial flights. My routine was two glasses of wine and Bose headphones to tune everything out.

Kosinski: I looked at hundreds of actors, narrowed it down to my favorite two or three [for each role] and then I sat with Jerry and Tom and, drawing on their decades of experience, we selected our final team.

Jerry Bruckheimer (producer): You look at their body of work, you look at who they are. They sit down in front of you, look you in the eye, and you can tell that they’re committed and that they want to advance their career through a movie like Top Gun .

Kosinski: I think it’s gut instinct, really.

Barbaro: I genuinely love flying. I told Joe in the room that I weirdly enjoy turbulence, and he quietly looked down at his notes like, “OK.” I was like, “That was a weird thing to say.” And then later I thought about it—that was probably the perfect thing to say.

Powell: None of that stuff had ever fazed me. One of the reasons I decided to sign on to the movie was the opportunity to be in the back of real F-18s and shoot this thing all practically. I didn’t want to pass it up. I was all in.

Ramirez: The first week, Monica was like, “It’s crazy this is going to be the peak of our careers,” and Tom’s like, “No, no, no, don’t you repeat that.” He’s like, “We didn’t just cast you guys because you’re great for [your roles]. We cast you because we think you’re going to be the next great movie stars.”

Part 2: “It Feels Like You’re Strapped in by a Couple Shoelaces.”

As part of Cruise’s extensive training program, actors learned to fly inside single-engine Cessnas before graduating to the EA-300 and L-39—aerobatic planes capable of pulling more G’s—to mimic the feeling of being inside an F-18.

Pullman: Tom had personally designed a training regimen that would basically condense two years of flight training into three months—and it was all done in a way that Tom had wished he’d had for himself on the original Top Gun .

Kosinski: He’s a licensed pilot. He flies aerobatics, he flies helicopters, he’s very familiar with what it takes to be in these planes.

Ramirez: Before we even got on a flight, they taught us about what creates lift and the physics of flight. That popped the bubble of fear for me.

Davis: Tom makes sure you feel comfortable with it, then he lets the instructors do what they need to do.

Kevin LaRosa Jr. (aerial coordinator): My dad and I started training all the cast in Cessna 172s. Where to look, how to talk on the radio, how to take off and land, basic flying technique—where and how to look like pilots while flying.

Barbaro: We never flew solo because legally you can’t unless you have a pilot’s license, but we got to a point where we were talking with the tower.

Powell: I’d been cast first, so I’d had a couple more opportunities to be in the Cessna. But I’d never done a takeoff and landing.

Ramirez: We showed up at Van Nuys Airport. I see Glen’s car parked with a big Texas license plate, and I’m like, “Oh, I’ve seen this guy from Scream Queens , he was pretty funny.”

Powell: I remember grabbing a Subway sandwich, getting to know each other in the parking lot. And then it’s like, “All right you guys, ready to fly?!”

Ramirez: It’s my first time, so I’m also a little nervous. As we’re on the runway and taking off, I’m looking at Kevin LaRosa Sr.’s hands, but they’re really relaxed, and they slowly start slipping off. I look over and we’re taking off because Glen is the one pulling back on the controls. I just panicked: Glen Powell from Scream Queens is the first person in this whole movie that’s taking me up in the air? What the hell?

Powell: We got up in the air and I could see he was kind of breathing a little heavier than normal. I looked back and said, “Everything good?”

Ramirez: We ended up flying for about an hour. He lands the plane, and I was like, “I would have never sat in that Cessna had I known that Glen was going to be the one that took me up.”

Powell: We were thrown in the deep end. The amount of trust that these guys had in us from the get-go was wild.

LaRosa: There were definitely actors who were very forward-leaning—fearless, loved every second of it. And then the normal person who’d be like, “Oh my goodness, I can’t believe I’m going to do this.”

Barbaro: We moved on to an Extra-300, which does all kinds of crazy loops and can pull nine G’s with two people in it.

LaRosa: G-forces are created when we apply a velocity or direction change to mass. They can be formed by the jet changing direction. The best analogy is when you’re on a roller coaster and you enter a corkscrew or loop, you feel your body being pressed into the seat—that might only be two G’s.

Pullman: Tom figured you could pull more G’s in the Extra-300 than the F-18, so if we could master that without a G-suit, once we got up in the F-18s, it would be like we had been running with weights on.

Powell: It’s almost like you’re spiraling down in a tornado formation, and you get these big wide turns that get smaller and smaller to increase the G’s until you’re on the verge of blacking out.

Davis: I have video footage of my face being distorted to the maximum. All the life drained out of my body.

Pullman: When you go inverted and you’re upside down, you’re just dangling over nothing. It feels like you’re strapped in by a couple shoelaces. I basically took it upon myself to go skydive. I was like, “If I can jump out of a plane willingly, then I can do all this stuff.”

Powell: Monica and I had this amazing competition every time where we could see who could pull more G’s. You’d do these fake bombing runs over and over, and I think Monica and I got to 6 or 7 at one point. That girl is tough.

Barbaro: We moved on to an L-39 jet. We did some dogfighting with each other, and then we got to fly in the F-18s. And then as refreshers we would fly in the EA-300 just to keep up with our training.

Pullman : We would do these little surveys after each flight. You write down how many G’s you pulled, what maneuvers you did, what challenges you may have had.

Davis: It was like a review-all questionnaire. How do you feel up there? What did you learn? How can we improve on your experience to make you more comfortable?

Pullman: In the beginning, we were all just filling them out not really thinking, Who is reading this? But whenever we saw Tom, he would come up to us and say, “Hey man, I saw that on your last flight you had a little trouble pulling zero G’s. Here’s what I do.” It was like, “Holy smokes, Tom Cruise is taking the time out of his jam-packed day to give me personal tips.”

Kosinski: We had our hands full. It was great to have Tom.

Bruckheimer: He checked the log, found out if somebody didn’t show up. He made sure everybody was there and did what they had to do.

Davis: He’s like the greatest Yelp reviewer ever.

In addition to the aerial training, the cast also needed to pass a Naval Aviation Survival Training course to simulate an ocean landing.

Kosinski: For people who didn’t like to swim, it was really difficult.

Ramirez: Tarzan didn’t even know how to swim when the whole thing started. We all felt like little tadpoles, but our instructor was a U.S. Olympic coach.

Pullman: I grew up swimming a lot, but it’s still different from swimming. It was like forced drowning. They drag you on a zip line to simulate being ejected overseas.

Davis: We had to gear up in about 40 pounds of Navy equipment. The helo-dunker submerges itself in water and flips upside down—it’s a complete 180, and you’re tied to a chair and you have to make your way out through a window.

Pullman: You have to have one hand on some part of the cockpit at all points, and if you have both hands off, you get disqualified. It was a challenge, to say the least.

Davis: Then we had a few tries with blackout goggles on our faces, and that’s when Lewis tried to drown me. [ Laughs .] He couldn’t get out the window fast enough.

Pullman: I also had a 101-degree fever that day and I couldn’t change the appointment so I basically had to do it all while incredibly sick.

Powell: You’re literally in a washing machine under water blindfolded and strapped in.

Ramirez: Glen and I had just passed the blindfold test, but Tarzan had failed one of the runs, so Glen was like, “Let’s go in there with him out of solidarity.” I felt a little cocky like, “Hell yeah, I’ve done it already.” We’re upside down, and I keep trying to open this harness, and Glen’s like, “All right, see you later.”

Powell: I’m literally blindfolded trying to find my way out like he is. He tells this story like I looked at him in the eyes and then abandoned him. Danny, you know that’s not how it happened, man.

Ramirez: I’d forgotten the emergency sign for the scuba divers to pull me out. I was about to open my mouth and swallow a bunch of water. Finally the harness slightly opens up, I squiggle my way out of there, break through the window, breach, and take the biggest gasp of air I’ve ever taken. I went up to the guys: “You didn’t see me down there unable to get loose on the screens?” And they were like, “No dude, we thought you were just chilling, you looked so composed and collected.”

Powell: I thought it was really fun, but if you’re having trouble with your harness and something gets stuck, it’s a pretty scary environment. I never panicked, but that moment for Danny I know is pretty scary. If I knew he was having a problem I would have totally gone over to help him. But I had a blindfold on.

Pullman: At the end of the day, everyone was always checking in on each other, making sure nobody was falling behind. It felt like a very safe space and everyone wanted each other to succeed.

Ramirez: The swim element was more like trauma-bonding.

Part 3: “You Can See the Tunnel Start to Close.”

Though none of the actors actually flew F-18s by themselves, they rehearsed repeatedly on the ground with their professional pilots to mimic each other’s movements and maneuvers, making it easier to perform and stay coordinated in the air. Still, sustaining eight G’s and flying at low altitudes provided all kinds of challenges.

Kosinski: We would do a two-hour brief every morning where we would go through everybody’s work—storyboard by storyboard, line by line, where the sun had to be, what the terrain had to be, what the choreography of the planes had to be. We had to make sure the Navy pilots and actors were in perfect sync.

Pullman: That was pivotal. Once you’re up there in the cockpit, you’re kind of on your own. You can’t walk down to Joe Kosinski and be like, “Did we get that take? Can we move on?”

LaRosa: He can’t be in the air with his cast, so he’s so involved in the planning and briefing stage. We always went through the same formula: What are we going to do on this flight? How are we going to obtain all of that on this flight? And we end it with safety being paramount.

Kosinski: After that we would move to something called “the buck,” which was a plywood mockup of the F-18 cockpit with all the instruments and switches in the same place, but on the ground. We would walk through the entire day’s work shot by shot—spray the sweat on, turn the camera on, turn the camera off. It was a very tedious process to go through.

Pullman: Tom would sit on the outside of the buck and run the scene with you and give you direction and tips about how to make it more dynamic or more intense. Because these cameras are more stagnant and fixed onto the frame of the F-18, you have to kind of create your own dynamics within the frame.

Barbaro: There were four cameras facing us that were fastened to the cockpit, and two pointing toward the front of the plane over the shoulder of the actual pilot that was flying us.

Ramirez: As weapons system operators, [Lewis and I] had a tougher task of being back there and not looking in the direction we were flying. When we were banking to the right, we’re looking to the left.

Barbaro: We would have to sort of direct or remind our pilot exactly where to line up with the sun. For example, if I was flying in a certain direction in the morning and Lewis was flying with the same pilot later in the day, they had to fly in the opposite direction so that there was continuity.

Kosinski: I wanted it to be muscle memory because when you’re pulling six or seven G’s, you don’t want to think about anything.

LaRosa: Typically, jets would go on an hour-and-a-half mission, return, and then debrief. We’d sit there and watch all the footage with the pilots and the cast and Joe would say, “Oh I need you to look a little more this way, need you to fix your mask here, furrow your brow more.”

Powell: You’re running cameras, you’ve got to remember your lines, you’ve got to [remember] sun position and keep that consistent, know where the other airplane is so you don’t run into another aircraft, the altitude, the airspeed—all these things have to be together. When you’re up there, you’re the pilot in command, you’re the only one who is in charge of this stuff. It’s a very empowering experience.

During a training run in Top Gun: Maverick, in which the pilots must ascend at a vertical angle to eclipse a mountain peak, Coyote (Davis) blacks out at eight G’s and descends into a free fall before regaining consciousness. One of the movie’s most extreme scenes, it epitomizes the physical toll required to be an F-18 pilot.

Kosinski: It was one of the first sequences we shot, and it was such an important one because the footage that Tarzan got on that flight was so spectacular that when we put it on the big screen, it really motivated everybody.

LaRosa: There’s a shot from behind the F-18 slow-rolling toward the ground. That is a real, practical shot. That’s me in the CineJet chasing an F-18 toward the earth as if the pilot has passed out. We’re doing 400 miles per hour.

Pullman: What we learned in preparation of getting into the F-18 and pulling G’s was you have to do this thing called the “Hick maneuver” to stop the blood from leaving your brain and rushing to your legs. You flex from your calves, to your thighs, to your core, to your chest, to your head in succession so it flushes all the blood up to your head.

Davis: I realized if I were to do the Hick maneuver well, I’m not really passed out, and the audience would see that on camera. So as I’m going, I am literally dying not being able to do the Hick maneuver—and I still have to act.

LaRosa: For Tarzan, he’s on a jet rolling toward the ground.

Davis: I definitely have to trust my freaking pilot. He also played limp, so they could match the cut in the edit. I’m like “Yo, when are you going to pull up?” At one moment we were really close to the ground. Pull up! Pull up!

Kosinski: He swore to God he didn’t pass out, but we all think he might have.

Davis: People thought I really passed out. I did not—that was just some damn good acting.

Barbaro: It takes a lot of core strength and a lot of clenching to stay awake and control the aircraft.

LaRosa: You have like 1,700 pounds of pressure on your chest.

Pullman: It’s sort of like your spine is sliding back into the chair and a rhinoceros just popped a squat on your lap.

Powell: In order to breathe in those face masks, you have to push out air in order to suck in air, so you’re almost hyperventilating in order to breathe. If you’re not doing the Hick maneuver correctly, you can see the tunnel start to close in and you’re like, “Oh no.” You just try to keep pushing blood back in your head so you don’t black out.

Davis: When you have motion sickness, they say to look at the horizon and it will settle your stomach. You can’t do that in the F-18 because the cameras are directly in front of you. You have to look inside the cockpit—that makes you even sicker.

Powell: I’ve got to give Lewis and Danny credit as WSOs. They’re looking all around this canopy and when a turn happens, they’re looking in the opposite direction, which is the easiest way to get sick. It is brutal.

Pullman: I tried [Dramamine] on the first flight, but you have to be so cognitively alert. I couldn’t have any fog, I had to be incredibly sharp up there. So I had to find some ways to settle the stomach.

Ramirez: Lewis and I will be the first to admit that we puked.

Powell: You keep your puke bag in your leg pocket. Sometimes when you’re pulling these really dynamic maneuvers with high G’s, you can’t even bend your body to grab that bag.

Ramirez: You just open it up and send your lunch back down.

Davis: You have to push through, you have to rally. You have to know once you get down, everybody’s going to be watching you.

LaRosa: If someone goes out in an aircraft and gets sick, typically you’re done for the day. You feel washed out and tired, you want to rest. We got our cast to a level where they would get sick and fight through it. There’s no pulling over.

Powell: The rite of passage after every flight is you have to go straight from the plane to the briefing room. You would show your empty puke bag to kind of be like, “Did it.” So I would end up taking two puke bags back there—one to puke in and one to show. And then at a certain point I just owned it.

Ramirez: Monica for sure never puked. She was also the person that pulled the most G’s on the EA-300. But Lewis has the most grit of anyone I’ve ever met. He was going to puke and instead said, “Not today,” and swallowed it all back down.

Powell: I’d have a stick and throttle in the back, and if I could put my hand on the stick and throttle and do some kind of maneuvers, there was something mentally [about] controlling the aircraft instead of being a passenger, it changed everything.

Kosinski: Every day was a struggle for those pilots—and the Top Gun pilots themselves. If you haven’t flown in a week or two, and you get back in that jet, they get sick as well. But you have to just learn how to work through it.

Ramirez: In college, I never learned how to puke and rally. So in a confined space, and to be able to push through it, I was very proud of it. I was like, “I don’t want to be cut out of this movie.”

Part 4: “Tom Cruise Is Maverick.”

Cruise’s reputation as an extreme stunt performer and adrenaline junkie preceded his arrival to set, but throughout shooting Top Gun: Maverick , his ambition and daredevilish feats blended with his character and continued to defy the cast and crew’s expectations.

Kosinski: We were shooting the third-act scene in the snow-covered mountains at Whidbey Island. One day, the weather was so spectacular and we had so much work to do, so Tom flew three sorties in a day. Most of our actors would fly once a day. On the last flight, he came back to the debrief room. I could tell he was exhausted and he just sat down on the chair and he put his black Ray-Bans from Risky Business on. I was like, “How did it go?” And he said, “We crushed it.” And he did crush it.

Davis: At one point we were too high up above the canyons, and Tom saw the footage and was like, “This doesn’t work, there’s no danger in this.” And when he says it, you’re like, “Oh, God, Tom, no.”

Bruckheimer: They were 50 feet off the ground, it’s unbelievable. When the pilot got on the ground, he turned to Tom and said, “I’ll never do that again.” Tom pushes them. He said, “We’ve got to make this look real, we’ve got to do this right, it’s got to be a love letter to aviation. We’ve got to be able to make people feel what it’s like to be in one of these planes.”

Powell: The rules are not the rules, the accepted boundaries are not the accepted boundaries. He’s a guy that is constantly pushing everyone around them to do things they never thought were possible.

Barbaro: He really was an incredible resource. Not only did he design the entire aviation training course, but he also taught us how to make a film, how to study film. He would really look you in the eye, and talk to you, and make you feel heard.

LaRosa: There was one day where he came out of the parachute and helmet shop and passed me to the F-18. He was in his Maverick helmet and his full getup. I just remember looking at him going, “That’s Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell.” Instant goosebumps.

Davis: You’re like, “Wow, this is Maverick. This is the real life Maverick.”

Powell: Tom Cruise is Maverick.

Davis: What is Tom not good at? I remember I threw a pass to him [playing football] and he just went gunning. He took off down the sideline in the sand in jeans, and nobody was catching him. I was like “OK, I’m glad you’re on my team.”

Ramirez: I had just finished my last F-18 flight—we were doing a really intense sequence. We land, we’re in the briefing room, we show the footage. Tom is super excited. “Ah, you nailed it.” We’re all hyped. And then Tom’s like, “You heading back to L.A. today? Grab your bags.” So, Tarzan and I are flying back with Tom in his private jet. He’s like, “Yeah, I just bought this.” We land, and then he just jumps onto his motorcycle and hauls ass away. We’re like, “What the hell?” It was the most Hollywood thing I could have ever imagined.

Davis: He may seem intense, because what we’re doing is serious, but he’s a character.

Bruckheimer: I work with actors that can’t wait to go home. It’s so much fun when you have an actor like Tom who understands all this.

Powell: On this movie I’m doing next with Richard Linklater , Tom’s already given me notes on the script, how to build character. That level of TLC and the fact that I can actually call him a real friend … he’s not just bouncing after wrap, he’s really special.

Pullman: There was this moment where Tom brought us into his trailer to show us the first trailer of Top Gun: Maverick . I will always remember Glen Powell looking at Tom and sort of jokingly going, “Tom, you realize now the only way to top yourself is to shoot a movie in space.” Everyone was laughing. And with a sense of seriousness, Tom just nodded: “Yes, that’s true.” Like, this is what’s next for me, this is my duty . And I think he is going to space with Doug Liman .

Powell: You’ve got to watch saying things like that, because Tom will figure out a way to get there.

Part 5: “Welcome to the Skies.”

During the more than 10 months of shooting (and 800 hours’ worth of footage), Top Gun: Maverick pushed everyone’s technological, physical, and mental limits to the brink, creating an instant bond and camaraderie between the cast and crew.

LaRosa: It is no joke what they were doing every single day.

Kosinski: Nothing was easy on this film. We’d only get a few minutes of usable stuff every day, but it’s the only way to get what we got. That was the way it had to be done.

LaRosa: With practical aerial stunts and aerial cinematography, it’s a more visceral feel. You’re not watching a cartoon, you’re not looking at anything fake. You’re looking at something that actually happened. And that means something to people.

Bruckheimer: When the aerial stuff was done, that was my biggest relief. Machines can break, they can have problems. But the pilots were so terrific; the Navy was so great surrounding us with the best mechanics, best aviators—and the precautions that Tom took, which he always does, made sure our actors were all safe.

Barbaro: There was a scene we shot before we did all our pilot training. But after we learned how to become pilots, we apparently walked with more swagger. They were like, “Oh, you guys are walking differently, we have to go reshoot that scene.”

Davis: When you see us in the bar, those are some cocky mothersuckers in there. Why? Because we went through it.

Powell: I’m really proud to look back and go, “Wow, I accomplished way more than I ever thought was possible,” and it’s because of a guy like Tom, who has been pushing for 40 years.

Barbaro: It’s kind of incredible, we stay in touch all the time. Ten months after being in a particular character’s world, it takes a minute to shed that.

Kosinski: It was clear there was a natural chemistry there that got stronger as they went through the flight training and swim training—and the shoot itself.

Pullman: I definitely miss it. I miss going up there.

Powell: For Christmas, Tom gave all the young guns the iPad with ground school on it, and so we all had the opportunity to study it and pick it up.

Pullman: Everyone wants to continue their aviation journey in some sense or another.

Barbaro: I’m almost done with ground school. I’m kicking myself for not just doubling down during the pandemic, but I have every intention of doing it.

Powell: I started flying on my own, and Tom was with me every step of the way. After I got my private pilot’s license, there was a note waiting for me on the ground from Tom that said, “Welcome to the Skies.”

Davis: Tom got us skydiving lessons. Then we went through drifting lessons. Then weaponry training. Dirt bike lessons. I’ve done everything I can think of.

Pullman: I was craving those adrenaline spikes because there’s nothing like it.

Davis: There’s nothing I can say I’m afraid of. Maybe a bee. Other than that, I can do whatever the hell I want now.

Jake Kring-Schreifels is a sports and entertainment writer based in New York. His work has also appeared in Esquire.com, GQ.com, and The New York Times .

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Tom Cruise Experienced 8 Gs of Force in Top Gun: Maverick Flight Sequences: ‘You Can’t Act That’

Tom Cruise is at his best when doing his own stunts — including flying his own jet in the upcoming Top Gun: Maverick .

The 57-year-old actor revealed what it took to fly a real jet for the sequel to his classic 1986 film Top Gun in a special behind-the-scenes video.

“You just can’t create this kind of experience unless you shoot it live. In order for us to accomplish this, we have the greatest fighter pilots in the world working with us,” Cruise said.

RELATED: Jon Hamm Says Top Gun: Maverick Is ‘Mind-Blowing’: New Footage ‘Is Out of This World’

The experience “is aggressive,” he continued. “You can’t act that, the distortion in the face. They’re pulling 7 and a half, 8 Gs, that’s 1,600 pounds of force.”

The film also stars Miles Teller , Monica Barbaro, Lewis Pullman, Glen Powell and Manny Jacinto as Cruise’s fellow fighter pilots whom his character, Maverick, must train for a special mission.

“I am so proud of them and what they’ve done. It is heavy duty,” Cruise said.

Six IMAX cameras were placed inside the cockpit of every fighter jet used in the film.

“It’s amazing what we see in the cockpit and what the audience is going to experience,” producer Jerry Bruckheimer said. “Thanks to Tom, all the actors are becoming accustomed to the g-forces by all the training that they’re doing.”

Last week, Cruise and his costar Val Kilmer gave their fans a sneak peek at the highly anticipated film, with the trailer released on Monday.

Top Gun: Maverick takes place decades after the 1986 original film and features Cruise’s return as Maverick with Teller playing Bradley Bradshaw, the son of Anthony Edwards’ pilot Goose. Kilmer, meanwhile, is reprising his role as Iceman.

RELATED VIDEO: Tom Cruise Surprises Fans at Comic-Con and Debuts the First Trailer for ‘Top Gun: Maverick’

The film also stars Jon Hamm , Jennifer Connelly , Glen Powell and Ed Harris .

Teller told The Wrap in June he struggled to keep up with Cruise while filming as the Mission: Impossible star is famous for doing his own stunts and keeping his fitness regime in top shape.

“I’m certainly trying, but it is difficult,” Teller said. “Just the volume of it. I’m sure a lot of people can do it for a couple of days or a week, but can you do it month after month after month?”

He continued, “There’s been nothing on this film that didn’t take a lot of training to accomplish.”

“I got a masterclass in how to make a movie, and Tom is always thinking of the audience,” Teller said of learning from the action star. “To work with someone who is so meticulous on every aspect, from the camera to the script to the character to the wardrobe to hair to makeup, literally every detail that guy is dialed in on, and anybody who works with him is fortunate.”

Top Gun: Maverick is set for a June 26, 2020 release.

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The behind-the-scenes story of shooting those crazy Top Gun: Maverick flying sequences

Tom Cruise insisted that his costars be filmed in actual flying jets.

Senior Writer

How do you convincingly shoot scenes in which actors look like they are flying in jets with extreme G-forces contorting their facial features as the planes perform extreme aeronautical maneuvers? You get the actors to do it for real. That, at least, was the conclusion of Tom Cruise when he began to think about how to shoot Top Gun: Maverick (out May 27), the action sequel in which his titular flying ace must prep a younger generation of pilots for a highly dangerous mission.

"It's the craziest idea," says Glen Powell , who plays one of the pilots Maverick trains in the film. "You kind of don't believe it. It was like: Okay, this is a really cool idea but it's never going to work."

Yet work it did, with Cruise, Powell, and other cast members believably looking in the film like they are really in the skies because they really were in the skies.

"It was a lot of work," admits Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski . "It was very tedious and difficult at times, but the footage speaks for itself."

When filmmaker Tony Scott directed the original 1986 Top Gun , he too had hopes of shooting actors in the air but was thwarted when cast members began throwing up whenever they were taken for a ride. "Though I was never really doing it, I learned the mechanics of operating the plane," Top Gun star Val Kilmer recalled in his 2020 memoir I'm Your Huckleberry . "We went up in the jets several times and... I have to report that I was the only one who didn't regurgitate, which, given the gut-wrenching drops and spins of those ferocious flights, was no mean feat."

In the years after Top Gun made him a global star, Cruise became a pilot himself thanks to Sydney Pollack, who directed him in 1993's The Firm and gave the actor flying lessons as a present. Cruise was determined to depict the aerial sequences in Top Gun: Maverick as realistically as possible, an ambition shared by Kosinski.

"I've always loved aviation, I was making model airplanes from a young kid and studied aerospace in school," says the director. "Every movie's a challenge, you know. I love that. If you don't have butterflies going into a project, it's probably not the right thing. I always want to look for something new to try and, yeah, this was a tough one but I had Jerry [Bruckheimer, the film's producer]. I had Tom, I had a great cast, and a story that we really believed in. So we gave it our best shot."

Cruise had played a military-school student in the 1981 film Taps and, together with costars Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton, attended a training boot camp ahead of the shoot. Inspired by that experience, the actor decided to put his fellow cast members through a training regimen which would allow them to be filmed in flying jets looking like actual, non-vomiting pilots.

"That was Tom's expertise," says Kosinski about Cruise's insistence that the actors be properly prepared for the shoot. "He's a pilot, and he's done aerobatics, and he was in the first Top Gun . He knew that they wouldn't be able to get in the plane and hold their lunch down and be able to do these scenes, so he created a training program that they all went through."

The actors began the schedule flying in single-engine Cessna 172 Skyhawks before moving on to the Extra 300, which is capable of more acrobatic maneuvers, finally graduating to L-39 Albatross single-engine high performance jets, which prepped them for the F/A-18s in which they would be filmed during the shoot.

"Tom used part of the budget of this movie in order to ensure that we were comfortable and able to emulate a real-life fighter pilot," says Powell. "There's no way without that regimen — a thing that he didn't have on the first movie — that we would be able to pull off these performances. There's full scenes up in the air and we would have been passed-out bodies just going for a ride."

Did Powell throw up over his plane? "Not on the plane," says the actor. "You've got bags obviously. I never missed a shot in the bag."

While the pilots were preparing to act like real pilots, Kosinski was figuring out how to shoot them doing so. "[That] took a lot of preparation," says the director. "We had to work for about 15 months with the navy to figure out how to get cameras in the cockpit. We ended up getting IMAX-quality cameras into the cockpit with the pilots and the actor."

During the shoot itself, Kosinski had the strange experience of "directing" actors who were many miles away during the actual filming.

"I'm there, with the actor, when they're getting in the jet, I'm setting the cameras up, making sure all the angles are exactly what we need," says the filmmaker. "But once that jet pulls out onto the runway, they're gone for the next hour or two. As soon as they land, we take the footage, we went into the debrief, we put it all in and watched it together. We give them notes on what didn't work, and we'd cheer when something was great, and then we'd give them notes and send them up again in the afternoon. It was a very unique way to direct, because it was a lot of prep and a lot of rehearsal. And it was very tedious — you're only getting a minute or two of good stuff every day. But it's the only way to get footage that looks like this."

The flight sequences in the finished film are certainly thrilling (EW's Leah Greenblatt praised Kosinski for "sending his jets swooping and spinning in impossible, equilibrium-rattling arcs"), aided by the fact that the cast's faces can be seen enjoying and enduring the aerial acrobatics.

"You just feel the peril for everyone in the movie in a different way," says Powell. "If you were using CGI, audiences are very smart, they can tell the difference. When you are whipping through canyons at 650 knots, you can't fake that, and you can't fake the Gs on actors faces."

So, if Top Gun: Maverick is a success, can Kosinski imagine overseeing more of such sequences in a sequel?

"It's all about the story for Tom," says the filmmaker. "If we can figure out a way to tell what Maverick's up to next, who knows?"

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Related content:

• The sky's the limit for Top Gun: Maverick hotshot Glenn Powell
• Why Top Gun: Maverick starts exactly the same way as the original film
• Review: Top Gun: Maverick is a high-flying sequel that gets it right

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Tom Cruise Created a Flight-Training Program for Top Gun: Maverick

Along with his deep ties to Scientology , Tom Cruise is also known for his commitment to real stunts. So it should come as no surprise he wanted the actors in Top Gun: Maverick to actually deliver their lines from the cockpits of moving F/A-18 planes. “I wasn’t ready to make a sequel until we had a special story worthy of a sequel and until technology evolved so we could delve deeper into the experience of a fighter pilot,” Cruise said in a promotional video for the movie.

Without proper preparation, however, g-forces exerted on the body by acceleration can result in illness or a dangerous loss of consciousness. To combat that, he personally designed a rigorous monthlong program that introduced his co-stars to different jets and instructors as they learned to fly and slowly built up their g-force tolerance. According to Men’s Health , the aspiring aviators eventually had to sustain up to eight g’s, or around 1,600 pounds of pressure. The cast — including Monica Barbaro, Glen Powell, Greg Tarzan Davis, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Miles Teller, and Lewis Pullman — filled out daily forms for Cruise to review until they were ready for real Navy pilots to take them up in F/A-18s equipped with six IMAX-quality cameras. (The Pentagon reportedly does not allow nonmilitary personnel to operate F/A-18s.) From puking to getting personalized feedback, here’s what Cruise’s co-stars have described going through during the Top Gun training made by “Maverick” himself.

Miles Teller (Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw)

“Nothing bonds a cast together more than collective suffering,” Teller said in the Cannes production notes for Top Gun: Maveric k. “I think, when you’re going through something and you know how tough it is yourself, and you look to the left of you and to the right of you and you see that person going through it, it kind of pushes you a little harder and further than you would normally go. It’s so unique for us that we will only be able to talk about this with each other for the rest of our lives.” Ahhh, trauma bonding.

Teller explained to Men’s Journal that all the elements of Cruise’s training, even breathing techniques, were utilized during the final sequences shot in the F/A-18s. “Every single day of the shoot we were really getting after it,” he said. “Up until the very last day people were fainting and puking.” In fact, Teller told London Live that he personally felt like vomiting every time he went in the air. “It’s funny,” he said, pausing to chuckle with the interviewer. After a moment, however, he added, “Wasn’t so funny for me.”

Monica Barbaro (Lt. Natasha “Phoenix” Trace)

In the Cannes production notes , Barbaro credited Cruise’s training program with preparing her not only to act in the planes but also turn cameras on and off, check makeup, fix props, and communicate with pilots. She explained to The Wrap that Cruise’s “perfect” training program also included minute-by-minute rehearsals with a pilot in a fake plane so that actors could plan when to say their lines. “It was pretty intense,” she said. “We got to watch Tom do it a few times. I was the first person of us pilots to do it. I was the guinea pig.” And while the cast had to go through all the rigorous flight training before even stepping on set, per the New York Daily News , Barbaro made it clear that the work continued during the ten-month shoot. “If we ever had a day off from filming, we would be sent over to the airport to go fly … to keep sustaining Gs,” she said. “It would’ve been a huge disservice to get out of shape.”

Lewis Pullman (Lt. Robert “Bob” Floyd)

Pullman didn’t mince words when it came to describing the experience of g-forces. “It felt like you had an elephant sit on top of you,” he told the Daily News . “You’re trying to keep all the blood to your brain so you don’t pass out, and you’re trying to remember your lines and you’re trying to look cool doing it.” Or as he later put it to The Ringer , “It’s sort of like your spine is sliding back into the chair and a rhinoceros just popped a squat on your lap.”

Pullman said that Cruise’s training regimen condensed two years of flight training into three months, covering everything Cruise wished he’d been taught on the original Top Gun. According to Pullman, one of the planes used during training actually allowed the cast to pull more g’s than needed for the final shoot. “So if we could master that without a G-suit, once we got up in the F-18s, it would be like we had been running with weights on,” he explained.

He was also impressed by the tailored feedback that came with the program. Initially, Pullman said, the cast thought that no one was reading the evaluation forms they were asked to fill out every day. “But whenever we saw Tom, he would come up to us and say, ‘Hey man, I saw that on your last flight you had a little trouble pulling zero Gs. Here’s what I do,’” Pullman recalled. “It was like, ‘Holy smokes, Tom Cruise is taking the time out of his jam-packed day to give me personal tips.’”

Danny Ramirez (Lt. Mickey “Fanboy” Garcia)

In an interview with Men’s Health , Ramirez called the intensive training program “the Tom Cruise School of Being a Badass.” He added that logging more than 40 hours of flight time “pulling mad Gs” taught him “the art of puking and rallying.” Before he shot Top Gun: Maverick , Ramirez apparently had never known how to recover after vomiting. “So in a confined space, and to be able to push through it, I was very proud of it,” he told The Ringer. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to be cut out of this movie.’” He also shared his admiration for his co-stars who were going through the same training, noting that Barbaro “for sure never puked,” despite pulling the most g’s on the EA-300. “But Lewis [Pullman] has the most grit of anyone I’ve ever met,” Ramirez recalled. “He was going to puke and instead said, ‘Not today,’ and swallowed it all back down.”

Jay Ellis (Lt. Reuben “Payback” Fitch)

“Flying commercial is boring now,” Ellis said when TMZ stopped him, appropriately, outside of LAX. He told the A.V. Club that Cruise’s commitment to reading everyone’s daily questionnaires was humbling. The cast submitted responses on a computer that were then sent to Cruise. “The next day you would get an email from Tom,” Ellis recalled. “And he would say, ‘Hey, I read your questions last night. Going to add a few more days to your flight training. Does next week work for you?’” But Ellis’s training takeaways weren’t limited to aviation. According to Ellis’s interview with Men’s Health , Cruise taught him to keep viewers engaged by being conscious of camera movements, which he later brought to his roles on Mrs. America and season four of Insecure . The skill seems like it’d be useful on any set, but especially so on Top Gun: Maverick, given that director Joseph Kosinski estimated that every 60 to 70 minutes of acting in the sky translated to a mere minute of usable footage.

Greg Tarzan Davis (Lt. Javy “Coyote” Machado)

Davis told The Ringer that he lied during his audition for Top Gun: Maverick and said that he was not afraid of heights. As you might expect, that meant he had some fears to face when it came to flight training. But according to the cast, the training was set up to explain the mechanics and physics of what would happen on the plane before they took flight. “Tom makes sure you feel comfortable with it, then he lets the instructors do what they need to do,” Davis said.

Still, he faced his own physical challenges while in the air taking g’s. In addition to g-forces distorting his face so much that it looked like the life in his body “drained out,” he struggled with motion sickness. Due to the camera setup, he could not look at the horizon to settle his stomach. “You have to look inside the cockpit — that makes you even sicker,” he said. Like his fellow onscreen pilots, Davis also praised Cruise for actively responding to the training questionnaires in hopes of improving the learning experience. “He’s like the greatest Yelp reviewer ever,” Davis said.

Glenn Powell (Lt. Jake “Hangman” Seresin)

At CinemaCon , Powell explained that Cruise put together the training program so that his co-stars wouldn’t be puking or passing out in government assets. “Half the shots in this movie, I’m literally holding a bag of my puke,” he admitted, noting that pulling g’s was incredibly painful. “Every time we went up there you have to mentally brace for a fight,” he said. “You get on the ground and you’re exhausted. That’s what’s impressive about Tom. He’s flying more than anyone in the movie — he would fly three times a day.” Powell told The Ringer that breathing in the face masks for pilots required pushing out and sucking in air nearly to the point of hyperventilation. Cast members also had to learn to do a flexing maneuver to keep blood from rushing away from the brain and to the legs. But whenever the said maneuver was executed incorrectly? “You can see the tunnel start to close in and you’re like, ‘Oh no,’” Powell said. “You just try to keep pushing blood back in your head so you don’t black out.”

Still, with Cruise in the lead, the training program was inspiring to his younger co-stars. According to Powell, the seasoned actor gave “all the young guns” on the film an iPad with Ground School, which would allow them to study to become pilots in real life. “I started flying on my own, and Tom was with me every step of the way,” Powell said. “After I got my private pilot’s license, there was a note waiting for me on the ground from Tom that said, ‘Welcome to the Skies.’”

• top gun: maverick
• on the record
• monica barbaro
• glen powell
• greg tarzan davis
• danny ramirez
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Top Gun: How fighter jet pilots withstand high G

Senior Lecturer in Physiology, University of Westminster

Disclosure statement

Bradley Elliott receives funding from The Endocrine Society, The Physiological Society, the Quintin Hogg Charitable Trust and private philanthropic donors. He is affiliated with The Physiological Society, and is a Trustee of the British Society for Research on Ageing.

University of Westminster provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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In the new Top Gun: Maverick film, pilots zig-zag fighter jets across the sky at stomach-churning speeds. Tom Cruise’s character, Captain “Maverick” Pete Mitchell, is still shocking fellow pilots with his prowess and daredevil antics after 30 years in the job.

Maverick flies an F-18 figher jet in the film, an aircraft which can reach over 1,000 miles per hour. How do real pilots cope with huge forces involved in flying so fast?

I’ve had a taste of what happens to your body when flying a jet. I was sitting in a tiny cockpit with four times normal gravity pushing down on me when another violent manoeuvre shoved me deep into my seat. Muscles fatigued beyond function, my vision began to grey out and I realised I was losing control.

I don’t remember what happened next but cockpit video footage shows me passing out and collapsing, held up only by my harness.

Thankfully, this wasn’t while in control of a multi-million pound high performance fighter jet and trying to outwit my opponent in a high-speed duel. I was in a ground-based training faculty for military pilots as a research guinea pig. Think of a merry-go-round spinning around, but much, much faster, and then expand it out so it’s the size of a bus, and you have a human centrifuge. I was strapped onto the outside of this, being tested as part of a study into the effect of high-gravitational loading (high G) on the human body. I failed this test in a way that would have crashed and killed everyone onboard if I had been flying a jet.

What is high G?

We are held to the surface of the Earth by gravity . This force can be quantified as one unit of gravity (1G). When you rapidly change direction (think about riding a roller coaster or cornering a car), you can feel centrifugal force (which acts on an object moving in circles) pushing you outwards. It adds to the force of gravity acting on you. I lost consciousness after about 15 seconds at 4G (or four times normal gravity pushing down on me) when this extra force overcame my blood pressure’s ability to move blood from my heart up to my brain.

Formally known as gravitational-induced loss of consciousness , pilots refer to this as “ Gloc ”, pronounced “gee-lock”.

The retinal cells at the back of your eye are particularly sensitive to low blood pressure . That’s why one of the first signs that Gloc is about to occur was loss of colour vision ( greyout ) before complete loss of vision (blackout). The next symptom was brain hypoxia – a complete loss of consciousness due to a lack of blood supply and therefore oxygen to the brain. Approximately 15-20% of Royal Air Force fighter pilots have experienced Gloc at least once in their career . As you wake up your muscles twitch uncontrollably and you are disoriented . Your neurons fire wildly while your brain tries to figure out what you just did and why.

Why pilots can withstand high G

High-performance pilots train on facilities like the centrifuge I was in and learn how close to the edge they can go, recognise the symptoms of greyout and blackout and when to back off. Pilots are also taught anti-gravity strain manoeuvres . These are a special set of contractions that squeezes the muscles of their abdominal core and thighs and physically push blood upwards towards their heart to keep the brain supplied with precious oxygen. Pilots wear anti-gravity flight suits, which automatically squeeze their legs when they do particularly violent manoeuvres, to help push blood towards the heart.

With training and practice, pilots can withstand more than twice the G force that made me pass out . This is physically exhausting training, comparable to working out to the maximum in a gym . But it can make all the difference during a high-stakes duel where turning your jet faster than your opponent is life or death. Military pilots are encouraged to keep fit as muscular strength helps with G tolerance .

Fighter jets are a long way from the relative comfort of crowded budget airlines. Rapidly changing gravitational loads on fighter pilots can result in severe back and neck pain due to constantly varying gravity, and delicate sections of pilots’ lungs can even temporally collapse under high-gravity loads.

Pilots must also master the mental aspects of high-performance flying. Controlling your own jet is a relentless maths challenge which fighter pilots must get a grip on while trying to out-think opponents in a highspeed 3D game of chess.

Top Gun: Maverick

What does that mean for the 57-year-old Maverick in his latest adventure? As we age, our bodies decline in all sorts of physical functions. This includes all the individual aspects of our cardiovascular system which works continuously to keep our brains well supplied with oxygen. While it’d be reasonable to assume that Maverick wouldn’t be able to pull the same G’s as his younger self, that might be incorrect.

There’s not a huge amount of data on older high-performance pilots, but there are some hints that suggest being older could be slightly beneficial to G tolerance, possibly due to higher blood pressures and slightly stiffer arteries seen with age. Since G tolerance can be learned by experience , it could just be that older pilots are better adapted through years of training.

That said, increased strength and muscle mass also seems to help with G tolerance , and we tend to lose muscle mass and strength with age. Older athletes retain more muscle mass and force with ageing than untrained older individuals, so if Maverick’s still playing plenty of volleyball on the beach and kept up his flying hours, he might just be able to outpace his younger self.

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Inside the Flight Training Program Tom Cruise Personally Designed for the Stars of Top Gun: Maverick

Welcome to what his costars call the "Tom Cruise School of Being a Badass.” Hope you brought a barf bag.

That's why Cruise personally developed a rigorous months-long flight training program, which Danny Ramirez dubbed “the Tom Cruise School of Being a Badass” for the cast of Top Gun: Maverick . He wanted to ensure that he and his costars would be able to actually fly their own F-18 jets through the sky to capture the movie's—what's the word?— intense flying sequences. So those scenes where the aviators all look like they're being pummeled to the edge of unconsciousness by G-forces? That's because they are. The movie's crew dabbed the actors' make-up, ensured they knew where the cameras over their cockpits were placed—and then they let 'em fly.

So Men's Health asked Paramount Pictures to give us a crash course in what the movie's cast had to endure for the most intense pre-production film prep ever. Here's what they provided:

The Overview

Top Gun: Maverick’s new aviators had to complete a comprehensive and demanding five-month flight training program devised, coordinated and overseen by Cruise himself, receiving approximately 34 to 36 hours of cumulative flight training each, and personalized nightly feedback from him on their progress. As per his instruction, Cruise’s students worked their way up from Cessna 172 Skyhawks, to Extra 300s, to the L-39 Albatross, to – finally – the F/A-18 Super Hornets.

The Syllabus

The ASTC (Aviation Survival Training Curriculum) that Tom Cruise and all the new aviators on Top Gun: Maverick had to complete to qualify for the extensive flying sequences included classrooms on topics including: Acceleration/G-Forces, Altitude Physiology, Reduced Oxygen Breathing Device Training, Aeromedical Aspects of Ejection, and Aviation Life Support Systems, before proceeding to Ejection Seat Trainer and Virtual Parachute Descent/ Parachute Landing Fall/ Lateral Drift Training.

Water Training

The course then moved to an outdoor pool, for more physically demanding training, such as survival stroke, survival gear inflation and underwater problem-solving. Methods included being rotated underwater in an ejection seat and being dragged across the pool attached to a parachute, from which students had to disentangle themselves.

Enduring G-Forces

When shooting the flying sequences, the actors often had to sustain up to eight Gs (potentially up to around 1,600 pounds of pressure on the body) and had to wear G-suits designed to prevent blackouts and G-LOC (a G-induced loss of consciousness).

Five real Navy bases were used as shooting locations in Top Gun: Maverick : Naval Air Station North in San Diego, Naval Air Station Lemoore in the Mojave Desert, the highly secretive Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California’s Central Coast, Naval Air Station Fallon (the current home of the TOPGUN program, although North Island is depicted as ‘Fightertown USA’ in the film) in Nevada, and Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington State.

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Top Gun: Maverick 's Jay Ellis on getting notes from Tom Cruise and pulling G-forces in an F-18

Why it's impossible to have a "rehearsed moment in a jet going 700 to 1000 miles an hour".

In Top Gun: Maverick , Pete “Maverick” Mitchell returns to the iconic flight school to shepherd a new generation of pilots through the maneuvers he perfected almost 40 years ago. What the characters experience on screen, the actors mirrored in real life, as Tom Cruise put his younger costars through their paces—not only to learn how to endure the G-forces resulting from their collective need for speed, but to transition from promising young performers into the kind of leading men and women worthy of the mantle of superstardom that Cruise has achieved.

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Since his breakthrough roles in The Game and Insecure , Jay Ellis has already set himself on that path, and more than anything else, Maverick evidences his capacity to hold his own against the other up-and-coming stars of his generation. Ellis recently spoke to The A.V. Club about the work he did to feel comfortable in the cockpit of an F-18 and why, with or without Cruise as a spiritual co-pilot, actually performing scenes in the planes was fully necessary. Ellis also touched on the larger imprint of Cruise’s legacy, and the Top Gun franchise as a whole.

The A.V. Club : Director Joe Kosinski talked about the amount of work that he subjected the actors to in terms of flying in the planes yourselves. But how important is all that stuff? I mean, I’m sure that it gives you a visceral sense of the experience, but ultimately you are an actor. You’re supposed to be able to pretend to do these things.

Jay Ellis: You know, it’s funny because we questioned that in the beginning. We were all like, “Wait, why are we doing all of this? This is crazy!” And then you start to realize that it’s not. Like yes, we are acting up there, but also we are pilots up there. We’re really going through every single thing that our characters are going through. We as individuals, as actors are going through what our characters are going through in any given moment. And I wouldn’t walk onto Chris Paul’s court and be like, yo, I’m about to drop dimes all day long. I just wouldn’t, you know what I’m saying? I would be very self-conscious. And I think that is the same thing about being a pilot. You can’t just hop in a plane and feel like you got it on a green screen. That’s just not realistic. And we were fortunate enough to be at a time where we could actually go make a movie in the back of F-18s and do this for real.

It is a huge, huge difference to know what it feels like to put G’s on your body day in and day out and to fly through super tight valleys and over the desert and pulling all these maneuvers. It’s something that I don’t believe that you could actually just act. I do think you needed the training for it. You needed to know the proficiency at which you need to be able to do those things—and what’s at stake, that was also another thing. The stakes are so real for these characters and you can only understand that and learn that, I think, by being in flight and understanding all the things in flight that could potentially go sideways. And then on top of that, you’re in the middle of a mission or a dogfight or whatever it is. I mean, you had to experience it.

AVC: Were there any surprises by the time you guys actually got to the maneuvers? Or was it a matter of acting surprised even though you’d been through it 40 times in rehearsal?

JE: If you had a rehearsed moment in a jet going 700 to 1,000 miles an hour, you are a way better actor than I am, I’m telling tell you right now. And I say that because every flight is different. Like yes, we rehearsed a ton and yes, we built up the endurance to take G’s and we knew the maneuvers we would be doing. But we did those, first of all, in a completely different aircraft. You did not have four cameras staring at you. You did not have 40 or 50 people waiting when you got back on the ground after you landed to watch through your footage with you, and watch your flight and see what you were able to capture. The training was meant to get us to this moment, obviously. And then once you get in the air, you get a little bit lower to the ground, a little bit lower to the ground. All the things just start to feel different.

You get the ground rush by you in a completely different way when you’re at 5,000 feet off the surface versus a thousand feet. It’s a completely different experience. And so I think the preparation for me was more about understanding flight, understanding the toll that it takes on your body, understanding what it looks like when you’re in a jet and you have to move one way or another and how your head rolls with you when you do that. But then once you’re up there, man, my pilot, the guy who flew me is a guy by the callsign Washjob, when he throws that stick, I may say “one, two, three,” but he might throw it at the top of three. He might throw it at the bottom of three. He might throw it on four. So you were truly reacting to the things that are happening to you while you’re up there.

AVC: Looking at Tom’s movies over the last 20 years, it feels like there’s a real generosity in him wanting to give his co-stars opportunities to shine. What was the attitude he brought to make you feel confident while you were supporting Tom Cruise in a movie?

JE: It was this thing where you go to work every day and you look up and all of a sudden Tom Cruise is standing in front of you and you’re like, oh shit, that is Tom Cruise . Then you get to the day and Tom comes over and he whispers in your ear and he’s like, “Hey, next time when you do that, try doing this and just like, see what happens.” And then you’re like, “Oh, he gave me a note!” That was cool—but the coverage was on him, and he still gave me a note. It’s one of those things where you realize that he’s paying attention at all times to every single one of us. And he also told us very early on, I want to show you the things that I have done in my career and the resources that I’ve been able to kind of use to build this body of work. And you take with you what you want. If you don’t want any of it, cool. I just want to be able to show it to you. And if you want to take it all, cool. I’ll be there to walk you through all of it and talk you through all of it. And he stuck to that, man.

When we were doing our flight training, we used to have to do this kind of a questionnaire after every single flight where we would answer, “How was your flight? Is there anything you need to make your experience better? What would you like to learn next? How many G’s did you pull today?” And you’d write in all of these answers and we did it on a computer, and it would get sent to Tom to read. And the next thing you know, the next day you would get an email from Tom and he would say, “Hey, I read your questions last night. Going to add a few more days to your flight training. Does next week work for you?” So all of a sudden you’re realizing that he’s paying attention to what you’re doing off set as well on set while he’s also in the middle of making this movie and running this whole thing—and also being Maverick. And it’s just gracious, man. It’s so humbling. And he cares. He really, really cares, and wants each one of us to be great. And I think every single one of us sat a little bit taller because of that, because somebody who you idolize and you think is such an amazing actor and person believes in you in that same way. And it’s inspiring.

AVC: The original film is famous for being a great military recruitment tool. You host the podcast series The Untold Story , which is very much about institutionalized systems and exploring those elements. Did you have any trepidation about jumping into a project like this?

JE: No. The thing that I always go back to is, my family has given their lives to this. We’re generational in the armed forces in this country. My grandfathers, my father, cousins who have now done it, who are the next generation. And so for me, the thing that I always take away is like, I honor and respect and I’m so grateful for the men and women who go into armed forces every single day to protect us. And they sacrifice time away from their families. And sometimes they sacrifice their lives. And they do it so my daughter can go to school and their kid can go to school and your kid can go to school. And I think that’s such a humbling thing. And so when you go and you make a movie like this, obviously we know the same thing and we met so many people in the Navy who told us they joined because they saw Top Gun and that was a big influence for them. And people even outside of the Navy who were just in the general aviation community at large are like, “I fell in love with flight because of that movie.”

You realize that there is a responsibility, and you want to make sure that you represent these characters, a very diverse range of characters—our first female pilot all the way down to literally the different racial backgrounds that all these characters have in the movie. We all wrapped our arms around it and we protected it because we realized there is a responsibility there. And Tom realized there was a responsibility there. And I think the thing that we wanted to do was make sure that, like, we were always just paying homage and saying thank you to the folks who do that for us day in and day out. And that was from how we carried ourselves to our performances, to how we leaned in and learned about every single thing that they do day to day.

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How Tom Cruise and Miles Teller pulled off those insane, high-flying stunts in Top Gun: Maverick

By Jack King

According to the aviation website Aerocorner , in today's money, a Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet — the fighter jet du jour used by the U.S. Navy since 1995 — costs the American government $67.4 million. That isn't a bulk deal, folks: it's per plane. It should come as no surprise to anyone with a sliver of critical thought, then, that Tom Cruise , Miles Teller and Co. didn't actually pilot the vehicles we see in Top Gun: Maverick .  

“But it looks real!” Yeah, it does. That's movie magic, baby.

Nevertheless, Tom Cruise knew from experience on the first Top Gun just how physically taxing the face-melting forces of extreme flight can be: on his debut test run, rocketing up to double the speed of launching astronauts, he hurled inside his oxygen mask. While they might not have actually hit the throttle and handled the joysticks, Cruise did insist that they actually go up into the air, albeit as passengers, not pilots. 

Ergo, he put the ensemble of Top Gun candidates through an intensive training course in the run-up to production. Going from smaller prop planes to, eventually, actual F-18s — loaned to the filmmakers by the Department of Defence for a measly $11,000 an hour — they learned not to fly the things, but how best to mitigate the ill effects of jet flight. In part, this was a three-month boot camp to avoid air sickness en masse. 

But it worked: “There was never a time on Top Gun: Maverick where we had to delay or stop filming because somebody felt sick,” says Kevin LaRosa II, the movie's aerial stunt coordinator. Sitting down with LaRosa for just under an hour, we got all the goss from the making of the Top Gun sequel.

The first rule of Top Gun: Maverick ? It had to be real, even when it couldn't be

"We had what I like to call rules on Top Gun: Maverick as far as aerials were concerned. And the first and foremost rule, it all had to be real. However: not every aircraft we used in the movie is readily available in the United States, or they're not flyable here, and we show their aircraft flying. 

“So here's the other rule: there has to be an aircraft in front of the lens, but a subject [stand-in] aircraft could be used — like another F-18. And then visual effects comes in, they tweak or retexture it to look like a different aircraft. [See: the ambiguously-defined ”fifth-generation jets" the equally nebulous bad guys fly.]

“But the beauty of that is the audience should know that there really is an aircraft out there — the vapour's going to be real, the flight dynamics are going to be real, it's simply a digital reskin of a real fighter. When it came to VFX plane shots? Always a real aircraft.”

And yes, that includes the cast actually being inside the cockpit

"Our cast had to be in the aircraft for every shot. So when they're delivering those epic performances, they are really in there pulling those Gs. Production went to great lengths to design that in-cockpit IMAX camera set up so those actors could be in there, doing that.

"This was a process that was built in and heavily driven by Tom Cruise. They had me build the training programme: we started them in Cessna 172s — my father and I were actually the first cast flight instructors — and those little single-engine aeroplanes are entry-level aircraft that anyone would learn to fly. 

"This gave the actors spatial orientation, and an understanding of what flying was all about, where to look where, where to move their hands, what all of the gauges do, the basic things. How to turn, land, takeoff.

"We graduated from there to an aircraft called the Extra 300. Their new instructor there was Chuck Coleman, a great friend of mine — again, this is all being heavily monitored by Tom Cruise every day, every step of the way. [Cruise earned his pilot license in the mid ‘90s.]

"This is the aircraft the general public would’ve seen in Red Bull Air Races or other stunt shows. It's a single-engine, piston-driven aeroplane that's extremely manoeuvrable and capable of pulling a lot of Gs. This part was to build up their G tolerance.

"From there, we moved on to the L-39 Albatross, a Czechoslovakian fighter trainer jet imported to the US — it's readily available, very manoeuvrable, very fun. And this was for the cast to learn how to pull heavy Gs. By the time they graduated from this one, and got into the F-18s, they were seasoned pros.

“This process lasted for three months, all in parts of Southern and Central California. That's why even for a guy like me, who can watch something and pick it apart, I watched Top Gun: Maverick and it looks like they're real naval aviators.”

Before Top Gun: Maverick , the technology to shoot it didn't exist

"The Cinejet platform is something that I dreamt up: I needed a camera platform that would match the story quality of Top Gun: Maverick , something that'd really let us get in there, into the dogfights and canyon runs, really put the audience through a thrill ride.

"I was struggling to find the right platform and, again, I landed on the L-39 Albatros. I put a picture of a camera gimbal over the nose of the jet — in an old programme called Microsoft Paint — and said, you know what, that's it. We had to work with the manufacturers to make it a reality but, a year later, the L-39 Cinejet was a real thing.

"Previous jet-based platforms worked with partially stabilised camera technology, meaning that if I'm flying that aircraft, and I rock my wings at all, it could disturb the shot. It was a lot harder for the aerial director of photography, or the camera operators sitting in the back of the jet — they'd have to stabilise my movements, which is very difficult to do.

“With the Cinejet, the gimbal is fully stabilised. It doesn't matter what I do while I'm flying, that thing's gonna be rock steady. Now you can get very aggressive, really get the camera in there so we're shoving the audience in the face of these afterburners.”

In the cockpit, the actors became their own directors, make-up artists and cameramen

"We were working with F/A-18 F Models, which are two-seat F-18s — basically a pilot up front, and typically a weapon system operator in the back seat. They look very, very similar. So we'd have forward-facing cameras over the shoulder of actual naval aviators in the front seat at the controls, and four rear-facing cameras [facing the cast] in the back.

"For the exterior sequences — say when we see Tom flying an F-18, we're enhancing that F-18 with CGI to change it from a two-seat to a single seat. The beauty is that really is a shot of Tom in the back seat of that F-18, so he is there, being piloted by a genuine naval aviator.

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By Xuanlin Tham

"The cast would have an hour and a half to two hours in the morning, and another period in the afternoon, but typically no more than four hours a day. But that's a lot of flying. When you're pulling those days and doing the type of manoeuvres that we were doing, that's a lot.

“Obviously everything in the cockpit needs to be stowed away. They would unzip their flight suit, pull out whatever they need to do their own hair and makeup — you know, spray their face if they needed extra sweat, make sure their mask was centred, their googles were clean.

“Once that was all done they'd stow all that stuff, hit the big red button and start rolling the camera. This is where they became like a [director of photography]: they'd tell their pilots, 'Hey, I need the sun back here at five o'clock, I need a thirty-degree right bank, and I'm gonna hit these lines!'

"Remember, in a jet, you're moving really fast, you're covering a lot of terrain — it's not like you can just get the perfect background and leave it there, you have to hit it, say your line, and come all the way back to get [another take]. By the time we'd get to the debrief, we'd sit there and watch maybe ten takes, and two would be perfect.

“So it's a lot of work — not just sitting there taking a joy ride!”

Top Gun: Maverick looks set to be Tom Cruise's biggest movie ever

Top Gun: Maverick is the greatest blockbuster of the decade

How Tom Cruise created Top Gun: Maverick 's bittersweet Val Kilmer cameo

By Rory Doherty

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Tom Cruise and 'Top Gun: Maverick' Cast Describe Film's 'Grueling' and 'Intense' G-Force Stunts

Top Gun: Maverick is available on digital Tuesday

The sky-high stunts in Top Gun: Maverick were just as intense to pull off as they were to watch onscreen.

In a behind-the-scenes clip shared exclusively with PEOPLE, stars of the blockbuster movie recall what it was like in the cockpit ahead of Top Gun: Maverick 's digital release on Tuesday.

"It's physically grueling being there, pulling those G's," Tom Cruise says in the video. "It's exhausting."

Director Joseph Kosinski adds that the actors faced up to 1,600 lbs. of force, or 8G's, in some of the stunts, and explained that it was "actually pulling the blood out of your brain" because of the g-force levels.

"The things that we did up there, you can't fake it on a soundstage," Greg Tarzan Davis , who plays Lt. Javy 'Coyote' Machado in the movie, says. "You can't fake the g-force distorting your face."

Costar Miles Teller focused on just staying composed during the action-packed scenes. "There's not too much acting going on," Teller, 35, says. "You're just trying to not pass out, not puke."

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The sequel follows Cruise's Pete "Maverick" Mitchell 30 years after his graduation from TOPGUN Naval aviation program, when he is called back as an instructor for the elite fliers. Lt. Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw (Teller) is the son of his late best friend Goose ( Anthony Edwards in the 1986 original ).

The cast also includes Glen Powell , Jay Ellis , Monica Barbaro and Lewis Pullman . Jennifer Connelly and Jon Hamm also star, while Val Kilmer reprises his role.

The digital release features more than 110 minutes of bonus content, from the cast's intense flight training program, to rare glimpses of how filmmakers shot the movie's spectacular aerial sequences, pushing the limits beyond Mach-10 with an experimental aircraft specially designed for the movie.

Top Gun: Maverick is available on digital Tuesday, with the 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD versions set for a Nov. 1 release from Paramount Home Entertainment.

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Watch Us Get The Tom Cruise ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Flight Experience

Watch what it’s like to train in the same planes the actors did for 'Top Gun: Maverick.'

To celebrate the digital release of " Top Gun : Maverick," CinemaBlend's Law Sharma enters the danger zone courtesy of Sky Combat Ace. We got to take control of an Extra 330 for a simulated dogfight, felt G-forces as we did aerial maneuvers, and even got to do a low-level bombing run, just like Tom Cruise and co. do in the movie. You can catch “Top Gun: Maverick” in theaters or on digital on August 23rd.

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12 Things You Might Not Know About Tom Cruise

By jake rossen | may 28, 2024.

Defining movie star is somewhat subjective. If it’s a combination of charisma, audience interest, and box office success, then one of the few performers that continue to meet the definition is Tom Cruise. The actor, who has been on screens for over 40 years, regularly makes movies that are considered appointment viewing in theaters even in the era of streaming. His Mission: Impossible series alone has brought in over $1.3 billion domestically.

Part of Cruise’s appeal is his enigmatic public persona. He rarely lets his guard down, preferring to let his work speak for him. Nonetheless, there’s still plenty to know about his life and career.

Tom Cruise started doing stunts early on.

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Born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV on July 3, 1962, in Syracuse, New York, Cruise seemed to be drawn to physical activity and danger from an early age. In 2022, the actor recalled that when he was around 4 years old, he thought it would be a good idea to jump off the roof of his childhood home while using a sheet as a parachute. "It’s that moment when you jump off the roof and you go, ‘This is not gonna work,’” he said. “’This is terrible. I’m gonna die.’ And I hit the ground so hard. Luckily, it was wet … And I saw stars in the daytime for the first time, and I remember looking up, going, ‘This is very interesting.’”

Cruise’s mother, Mary, separated from his father, Tom Senior, in 1976, when Cruise was 14. (The actor would later allege that Senior had been abusive toward him.) The family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, and Cruise also spent some time in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he briefly considered becoming a Franciscan priest. Eventually, he rejoined his family and they settled in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, where he joined the varsity high school wrestling team as a junior and senior. During the 1979-1980 year, the team went 14-4-1.

The wrestling may have indirectly played a role in his career choice. After a leg injury prevented him from continuing, he decided to investigate acting and signed up for a role in a school production of Guys and Dolls . “All of a sudden, I felt like I knew what I was doing,” he said in 1983. “And I got all this attention, and it just felt right. So I came to New York. I wanted to try [acting].”

In 1981, Cruise appeared in a small role in Endless Love and as a military cadet in Taps . Two years later, he appeared in the teen sex comedy Losin’ It and the football drama All the Right Moves . Cruise also scored a role as a street punk in The Outsiders . It was during filming of The Outsiders that Cruise auditioned for Risky Business , which cast him as a preppy kid who runs amok when his parents leave town. “I told them, ‘I can't afford to tamper with my Outsiders character because I have to work tonight,’” he said in 1983. “’I can't take a shower, even.’ I was all greasy, had a chipped tooth and a tattoo, and an Okie drawl. And they cast me for this clean-cut boy.”

Risky Business was considered Cruise's true breakout role. It also made Cruise synonymous with Ray-Ban sunglasses, which he later wore to great effect in 1986’s Top Gun .

The mid- to late-1980s was a period where Cruise was able to demonstrate his dramatic chops with prestige directors in films like 1985's Legend (Ridley Scott), 1986’s The Color of Money (Martin Scorsese), 1988’s Rain Man (Barry Levinson), and 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone). In the middle of this impressive run came Cocktail (1988), a relatively lightweight drama about a bartender who relocates to Jamaica. It was “not a crowning jewel,” he told Rolling Stone in 1992. The film earned a Golden Raspberry Award, or “Razzie,” for Worst Picture, the same year that Rain Man won the Oscar for Best Picture.

Given his collaborative nature and intense interest in filmmaking, it’s somewhat surprising Cruise has yet to helm a feature film. But he has gotten behind the camera. In 1993, Cruise directed an episode of the Showtime series Fallen Angels , an anthology set largely in 1940s and 1950s Los Angeles. In the episode, titled “The Frightening Frammis,” a con man (Peter Gallagher) has the misfortune to cross paths with a femme fatale named Babe (Isabella Rosellini). The series was produced by Sydney Pollack, who had just directed Cruise in the 1993 film The Firm .

When Cruise was cast as the vampire Lestat in 1994’s Interview With the Vampire , the book’s author, Anne Rice, was a vocal critic, saying she preferred someone like Daniel Day-Lewis for the role. After seeing Cruise in the part, Rice changed her mind, calling him “wonderful.” Cruise had a similar experience in 2012’s Jack Reacher , where fans of the Lee Child book series found him smaller in stature compared to Child’s towering protagonist. The film did well, however, meriting  a 2016 sequel, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back .

The list of movies Cruise has been offered (or at least had discussions about doing) is long, and the list of movies he’s turned down is likely even longer. Among them: Footloose , Edward Scissorhands , and The Shawshank Redemption . Director and writer Frank Darabont, who adapted the Stephen King novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption for the screen in 1994, said that producer Rob Reiner offered to acquire the script so he could direct and his A Few Good Men star Cruise could step into the role of Andy Dufresne. Darabont was tempted, but ultimately decided to make the movie himself. He cast Tim Robbins as Dufresne.

Cruise and then-wife Nicole Kidman agreed to star in director Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut , which examines the complicated marriage of a young couple tempted by forces outside their union. Kubrick ( 2001: A Space Odyssey ), a notorious perfectionist, shot the film for an astounding 15 months, far beyond the typical four- to six-month shoot of many films. Guinness World Records recognizes it as the longest continuous production in cinema history. (Interrupted shoots are a different story: Richard Linklater’s coming-of-age drama Boyhood shot for 39 days over a window spanning from 2002 to 2013.)

Eyes Wide Shut was met with a tepid reception, though it proved bountiful for Cruise. While on set, he met with director Paul Thomas Anderson, who cast him as a motivational speaker in 1999’s Magnolia . That part earned Cruise an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He had previously been nominated for Born on the Fourth of July and for Jerry Maguire (1996), though he has yet to win.

Cruise wasn’t the only member of his family to get into acting. His fraternal cousin, William Mapother, is also in the business and has shared several of Cruise’s film sets. Mapother was a production assistant before getting parts in Magnolia (1999) and in 2002’s Minority Report , playing a desk clerk who is threatened by Cruise’s distressed protagonist. Mapother might be best known as Ethan Rom, a character of dubious intentions on ABC’s drama Lost .

In 1996, Cruise and then-wife Nicole Kidman were aboard a yacht near Capri, Italy, when they came upon a family floating in a lifeboat whose own yacht had caught on fire. They climbed aboard Cruise’s vessel until the Coast Guard arrived.

A decade prior, it was Cruise himself who needed a hand. While filming Top Gun , he was dragged underwater by parachute lines. According to United Press International, Navy swim school instructors rushed to pull him out.

Shooting The Last Samurai with Cruise in 2003, director Ed Zwick was surprised to see several A-list directors dropping by the set to see Cruise. When the actor learned that David Fincher ( Fight Club ), Cameron Crowe (who directed Cruise in Jerry Maguire ), and others posed for a group photo with Zwick while he was busy, he asked that he be retroactively placed in the image.

To work with Tom Cruise is to risk being sent a cake every holiday for the rest of your life. (Or his.) Each year, the actor orders white chocolate coconut Bundt cakes from Doan’s Bakery in Los Angeles and has them sent to a list of recipients, including former co-stars. According to former talk show host James Corden, Cruise himself has never tried the cake. (Other stories, however, have him tasting it as part of a “cake-off” while Cruise’s then-wife Katie Holmes and Diane Keaton were making a film together in 2008. The cake was reportedly Keaton’s favorite.)

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Tom Cruise Marks 10 Years Since “Edge of Tomorrow” with 'Great Friend' Emily Blunt: 'Incredible Memories'

"I love her performance in this film. Her dedication. Her humor. Her vulnerability and power. She brought it all," he said

Tom Cruise is marking a decade since the release of Edge of Tomorrow and praising costar Emily Blunt .

On June 6, the actor, 61, shared a post on Instagram reflecting on the production and release of 2014's Edge of Tomorrow, including his fellow cast and crew, especially Blunt, 41.

"It's been 10 years since Edge of Tomorrow first hit theaters!" Cruise wrote. "I want to take the opportunity to thank Emily Blunt once again for being such a great friend and brilliant actress . I love her performance in this film. Her dedication. Her humor. Her vulnerability and power. She brought it all."

"This anniversary brings back incredible memories," he continued, before thanking the film's director, more of his costars, including late actor Bill Paxton.

Related: Emily Blunt Reveals Tough Advice Tom Cruise Gave Her on 'Edge of Tomorrow' Set: 'We Got Through It'

"My first collaboration with Doug Liman. Rejoining the indomitable Brendan Gleeson. And my first time working alongside the great [Paxton]. His performance and the character he created left an indelible mark on this film."

Led by Cruise as a military public relations officer with little combat experience, Edge of Tomorrow is an apocalyptic sci-fi film that takes place after Europe has been occupied by aliens. Cruise's character is forced into combat against his will, and finds himself stuck in a time loop, fighting the same battles over and over again as Blunt trains him as a fighter.

"Hitting this kind of tone was no easy task," Cruise continued in his caption. "The writing and storytelling of Christopher McQuarrie made the movie work. Along with the dedication of our entire team who helped bring it to the screen — it was an absolute joy creating it with you all."

"To everyone who has enjoyed this film over the years, thank you for being a fan. And thank you to Warner Bros. for making this film," he added. "I can't wait to share more about the great movies we’re working on."

Related: Emily Blunt Clarifies Story About Tom Cruise Giving Her Advice: 'Still Something We Laugh About'

Blunt has also been candid about her time on the film, opening up in a 2022 interview on the  SmartLess  podcast, hosted by  Jason Bateman ,  Will Arnett  and  Sean Hayes , about the physical difficulties she had on the set.

"We had to wear these enormous suits, which I think would've been great if we had CGI'd them, but we wanted to do it in a tactile way," Blunt said during the podcast, noting "there was nothing cozy" about these 85-lb. suits.

"I was like, 'Tom, I'm not sure how I'm going to get through this shoot,' and just started to cry," Blunt continued, before revealing how Cruise got her to laugh and power through the production.

"I was like, 'I'm feeling a bit panicky about the whole shoot,' and he literally goes — he just stared at me for a long time, not knowing what to do, and he goes, ' Come on, stop being such a p----, okay ?'"

Related: Emily Blunt Says Tom Cruise Was 'Such a Doll to Me' on Edge of Tomorrow Set: 'I Loved Him'

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"And I did laugh, and then we got through it," Blunt added, though she noted that she ultimately did injure her ribs and collarbone during the shoot. "But the training was intense. It was like twice a day we trained for it."

While appearing at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles for a  moderated conversation  with filmmaker Rob Marshall last year, Blunt also spoke about working with Cruise on Edge of Tomorrow, sharing that he helps to "tighten the screws on everyone when it comes to what you think you're capable of."

"Because he can do everything and wants to do everything, it makes you want to meet him where he is at," she saide, adding, "He's so inspiring. Such a doll to me."

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