tom cruise alter mission impossible

How Tom Cruise pulled off that 'Mission: Impossible 4' skyscraper climb and canceled his retirement from the blockbuster franchise

As the star of the Mission: Impossible movie series, Tom Cruise has been pulling off impossible missions — and improbable stunts — for a quarter century and counting. From the 1996 franchise-starter to the currently filming seventh and eight installments, the first of which will hit theaters in 2022 , the actor's alter ego, super-agent Ethan Hunt, has traveled the globe and saved the world many times over.

But Cruise's license to thrill almost got revoked a decade ago in the fourth installment, Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol . Directed by Brad Bird and released in theaters on Dec. 15, 2011, the movie was widely assumed at the time to be the star's final outing. In a new interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Ghost Protocol stunt coordinator Gregg Smrz confirms that's how things went down in the original script, which features an extended climax where Ethan chases rogue nuclear strategist Kurt Hendricks (played by Michael Nyqvist) around a towering carpark.

"There was a point in the script when he's fighting Michael Nyqvist where he was supposed to get his leg broken," Smrz remembers now. "They wanted it hyper-extended at the knee, just shredded — end of career, you know? The studio was going to write him out, and Tom did not want it. He was strapping in his harness, looked at me and said, 'I ain't going nowhere.' Then he walked out on set and did his thing. We had [the leg break] all set and ready to go, and it disappeared."

Turns out that Cruise called his shot correctly. Far from becoming his last Mission: Impossible movie, Ghost Protocol relit the franchise's fuse with a mighty $210 million domestic box-office gross and a wave of ecstatic reviews. The movie also boasts a sequence that consistently ranks on or near the top of any list of the very best Mission: Impossible stunts : Ethan's nail-biting climb up the side of Dubai's world-famous Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.

As stunt coordinator, Smrz — who first collaborated with Cruise on Mission: Impossible 2 — oversaw that scene and agrees that it's one for the record books. "I said to Brad, 'Do you have any idea what we're doing?'" he recalls. "'We're climbing 1,700 feet in the air, 200 feet up a building. This has never been done before, and it'll never be done again, because they're never going to allow it.' It's a work of art, and I don't think it can ever be beat as far as a climbing sequence on a building."

And as Smrz reveals, it's a stunt that very nearly didn't happen. Early on in pre-production, Paramount seemed poised to cancel Ghost Protocol outright before shooting started. "We had started prepping the building climb immediately on a studio lot, and were on the payroll for about before weeks when we heard that they were going to pull the plug. Tom went to have a meeting with [the studio] and we would know the outcome at the end of it."

Fortunately, Cruise emerged from that meeting with a greenlight, and Smrz and his team restarted preparations for pulling off the Burj Khalifa climb — a sequence that was always designed to serve as the movie's spectacular centerpiece. Initially skeptical that the building's owner would let them turn the 2,722-foot skyscraper into a movie set, the crew recreated three floors of the Burj on a soundstage in Prague. "We built an adjustable wall, slowly raised it until it was vertical and practiced for 200 hours on it with a crew of seven or eight guys. But Tom kept saying, 'I really want to climb that building.'"

Eventually, a compromise was reached: the production could shoot for one day on the exterior of the building, and the rest of the sequence would be shot on another 60-foot adjustable wall that has been constructed in the desert outside of Dubai. Once again, though, Cruise changed the course of production with a single sentence. "The first day [on the Burj] went so well that Tom said, 'We're filming the whole thing here on the real building.' We ended up doing one day of shooting over on the set, and the rest of it was on the real building."

With Cruise leading the charge, the Ghost Protocol crew worked out a deal with the building's owners that gave them full access to several floors that weren't yet in use. Smrz and his team then knocked out roughly 17 glass panels to make room for the stunt and camera cables and other rigging.

"I told them, 'We won't scratch your building; we're not going to damage anything.' As they saw that we were not destructive and really cared about their building, they started to work with us. There was this one guy I called Dr. No, because every time I'd ask if we could do something, he'd go, 'No!' at first. But towards the end, if I said, 'Hey, we need to drill another hole,' he'd say, 'Just tell me where.'"

As designed by Cruise, Bird and Smrz, the eight-minute Burj sequence has two distinct movements: Ethan's slow, deliberate climb up the side of the Burj in order to recover all-important nuclear launch codes and then his rapid descent. The upwards journey includes a gasp-inducing plunge where Hunt falls from an unsteady perch outside his target floor. Cruise performed the fall himself, dropping roughly forty feet from a height of 1,700 feet off the ground.

"That was probably the most nail-biting day of the show," Smrz says, adding that they only did a single take of Cruise's fall. "Somebody said, 'What if the cable breaks?' And I said, 'That's not an option.' We actually did the math, and there was enough time of free fall for him to text me on the way down, and for me to receive it!"

But Smrz also makes it clear that he would have overruled Cruise if he truly felt the star would be in danger. "If he wasn't an actor, Tom could have been a stuntman, and I would put anybody in anything if I didn't think it was safe for a stunt guy. I've got to be 99.9 percent sure it's going to be successful before we do it, whether it's a stunt person or an actor. So putting Tom into the harness was no different than a stunt guy. I expect the stunt to work, because we've already proven it over and over. "

Ethan's journey down the Burj starts with him running down the side of the building until he literally reaches the end of his rope. But he's the opposite of home free: He's still one floor above the rest of his team — William (Jeremy Renner), Benji (Simon Pegg) and Jane (Paula Patton) — and has to make a daring leap into the void to reach them. In order to gain the necessary momentum, Ethan runs in the opposite direction alongside the building and then power jumps into the air, swinging on the cable in a wide arc as he heads for the open window where William and Jane stand.

"When Tom swung on that rope around the building, Brad wanted him to go out farther," Smrz remembers. "I said, 'We'd have a problem: He has to come back, and I can't soften the impact on the glass. So the farther he goes out, the harder he's going to hit the glass, and he's already hitting it really hard.' Brad came from the world of animation where anything he wanted to do was possible, but I have a reputation for trying to keep everything real. I like to see when they hit the ground, that it hurts. But Brad was great to work with, because we'd always just sit down and talk and make sure we both were happy."

Ethan's cable swing also includes some shots that were filmed on the recreation of the Burj, including the moment where he unclips in mid-air and the moment where he flies at the window, hitting his head. But the scene where Renner clutches Cruise's leg high above Dubai was filmed on location. "We had Tom suspended on the real building, and then we dropped him," Smrz explains. "Jeremy and Paula were on cables, and they actually did dive out the window and caught Tom by his ankle. The actors did a fantastic job, especially because it was hot. We were working on glass, and it got up to 125 degrees."

The Burj Khalifa climb wasn't just a franchise-best stunt: It was also a personal best for Cruise, one that the actor has been trying to top ever since. "He wants to beat it," says Smrz, who hasn't worked on a Mission: Impossible movie since 2015's Rogue Nation , where Cruise awarded him the opportunity to choreograph the wild motorcycle chase of his dreams . "We took it to a whole other level, but it wasn't beating the building, you know what I mean? It was just a motorcycle chase. So they came up with that plane stunt . Tom's going to try to step it up to the next level in every movie, but he's also getting older: I used to tell him, 'Tom, you're going to end up walking like I do if you keep this up!'"

In that case, it's just as well that Cruise is better known for his running anyway. Asked about the actor's famously meme-friendly fleet feet , Smrz confirms he's the last person you want to be in a race with. "He can run 17-and-a-half miles an hour," he marvels. "In the scene where he's running away from the Burj, I had my stunt guys chasing him, and he was killing them. I said, 'Can you slow down a little?' And he started laughing and said, 'I'm not slowing down — tell them to speed up!' He's really fast and he has this odd style where he really lifts his legs high, and he's got the arms and legs pumping. Maybe that's his secret."

Reflecting on the Burj Khalifa climb a decade later, Smrz feels that it's increasingly rare for a studio to allow a movie star, and a stunt crew, the time and resources necessary to pull off a major setpiece on that level. "The big thing was that we really could have done that entire sequence on a stage and with visual effects. But Tom refuses to do that, because he wants climbing the Burj to be part of the thing that he does. He likes to do his own stuff, it's great for publicity and he enjoys it. It's always funny when somebody tells me, 'Tom's not going to do that — the studio's not going to allow it.' And I just say, 'He'll be doing it.'"

At the same time, with the tragedy on the set of Rust still fresh in everyone's minds , Smrz acknowledges that the industry is potentially facing widespread change in terms of how major action sequences are handled, especially when guns are involved. For his part, he believes that safety is always paramount even if it comes with a price tag. "I've been told [by studios], 'You and your guys are too expensive,'" Smrz says. "But at the end of every film, I always ask, 'Still think I'm too expensive?' and they go, 'No, we got what we paid for.' It's so busy out there right now ... and it has a lot to do with the experience of the person they hire. And right now, they're kind of hiring anybody, so it's a little scary.

"I don't think squibs and gunfire are going to go away," Smrz continues. "It's part of the job, and you have to be extra safe and unafraid to stand your ground. You have to be willing to get fired if you know that you're right and they want to push on anyway. On five occasions, I've started to walk off the set and never made it off because they realize how serious you are. You're willing to leave the movie, and that's what it takes if they expect us to keep it safe. I don't think it can get any safer: I mean, if they're going to make it so problematic that they'll just stop doing stuff, it'll all be cartoons."

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is currently streaming on Paramount+.

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Tom Cruise Wants To Pull A Harrison Ford And Make Mission: Impossible Movies Until He's 80

It is happening again, as the nameless Giant once warned Dale Cooper on "Twin Peaks." Yes, it seems "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One" ( which Chris Evangelista reviewed for /Film ) and its forthcoming sequel might not be the end of the road for Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt as previously assumed. In fact, Cruise, like the ever-resourceful Impossible Missions Force (IMF) agent he plays in the franchise, hopes to continue defying the odds for years ... nay, decades to come.

This recurring cycle of reports alleging Cruise is about to step away from "Mission: Impossible" only for the actor to pump the brakes on any such foregone conclusions began in 2011, back when "Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol" very nearly retired the Ethan Hunt character for real . It was heavily rumored that Jeremy Renner (who plays IMF analyst William Brandt) would've become the new torch-carrier had that happened, but as the "Bourne" films and app developer Escapex could tell you, you should never go all in on Jeremy Renner. Luckily, Paramount didn't, and the success of "Ghost Protocol" — the highest-grossing "Mission: Impossible" film at the time of its release — led to writer/director Christopher McQuarrie taking over the series starting in 2015. In doing so, he also ushered in a new chapter for Cruise and his IMF alter ego that's yet to reach its conclusion.

Although it's been speculated (presumed even) that "Dead Reckoning Part Two" will serve as Ethan Hunt's final bow , that might not be the case, at least if Cruise has any say in the matter. Indeed, the actor, who only just turned 61 years young on July 3, 2023, has been inspired by octagenarian Harrison Ford donning his fedora and leather jacket to star in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny," and he plans to spend the next two decades playing catch-up.

The living manifestation of destiny

During his interview with The Sydney Morning Herald at the Australian premiere of "Dead Reckoning Part One" (via Variety ), Tom Cruise made it clear he's not going to let a little thing like his mortality stop him from making his own action films when he's Harrison Ford's age. "Harrison Ford is a legend; I hope to be still going. I've got 20 years to catch up with him," said Cruise. "I hope to keep making 'Mission: Impossible' films until I'm his age."

At this stage, trying to accurately predict when Cruise will finally quit the "Mission: Impossible" franchise feels about as fleeting a task as guessing when the final "Avatar" sequel will arrive or believing Liam Neeson when he claims he's done making action-thrillers . On that note, it's not inconceivable that Cruise could eventually transition into the type of action career Neeson's had post-"Taken," i.e. where his films actually factor his age into the equation (lest we end up with another amusingly bizarre situation like Russell Crowe calling a then almost 55-year-old Cruise a "younger man" in 2017's "The Mummy"). After all, that's what Ford has done in his own films for the last 20 years and it's worked out pretty well for him.

Then again, as we only just saw with "Dial of Destiny," it's the box office that will ultimately decide when Ethan Hunt rides off into the sunset (or, as seems more befitting of Ethan, hang-glides off a cliff before firing himself out of a cannon into the sun). So it's best that we table this discussion until we know for certain whether or not "Dead Reckoning Part One" has defied the 2023 trend of would-be summer blockbusters with excessively huge budgets under-performing in theaters.

"Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One" opens in theaters on July 12, 2023.

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Tom Cruise reveals how the 'phenomenal' vault scene from 'Mission: Impossible' came together

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It's the stunt that made the Mission: Impossible franchise... possible. Midway through Tom Cruise's maiden assignment — which premiered in theaters a quarter-century ago on May 22, 1996 — his daredevil espionage agent, Ethan Hunt, executed the first of many impossible missions by breaking into a supposedly impenetrable CIA black vault via a literal high-wire act. Lowered into the vault on a thin cable, Hunt has to download crucial information off of a then-state of the art (and now hilariously antiquated) computer, while making sure he doesn't speak, slip or even sweat.

It's fair to say that Cruise's stunts have gotten more elaborate across the subsequent 25 years and five Mission: Impossible movies (with two more on the way), which require him to outrun missiles on a bridge or hang off the side of a plane . But the vault scene, which was dreamed up by director Brian De Palma, remains the franchise's quintessential set piece, and the first indication of how committed the star was to make this his signature franchise. In the words of CineFex's Art of the Scene appreciation , the vault stunt single-handedly "transformed the boyish Tom Cruise into a man of action."

According to Cruise, this transformative sequence was something of a happy accident. In a new interview with current Mission: Impossible director, Christopher McQuarrie — who joined the series with Rogue Nation , and went on to helm 2018's Fallout as well as the seventh and eighth films that are currently in production — the actor says that De Palma came up with the idea before they even had the movie's plot in place. "There was no story," Cruise remarks in a featurette that's included on the new 25th anniversary Blu-ray edition of the first film. "[Brian] would just start setting up shots, and then we'd go back and try to work on the story."

De Palma first mentioned the vault sequence to Cruise on a long-distance call when the actor was in Japan promoting another movie. "He pitched me the whole CIA scene on a phone when I was in the back of a car," Cruise explains, confirming that the director modeled the stunt after the classic 1955 French film Rififi , which boasts one of the all-time great movie heists. "I just went, 'OK, this movie is really cool.' It was a phenomenal idea."

When it came time to stage the break-in, De Palma and Cruise depended on the expertise of legendary stunt coordinator, Greg Powell, who has put such action heroes as James Bond, Jason Bourne and Harry Potter through their paces. The scene called for Hunt to be lowered in on a cable operated by his partner-in-espionage Franz Krieger (Jean Reno). In fact, Cruise performed the scene without his co-stars on a soundstage in England populated only by De Palma and the rest of the stunt team. "It was all done by hands and weights," Powell remarked on a 2006 DVD featurette that shows behind-the-scenes footage of two crew members raising and lowering the star on high-strength Tech-12 rope .

"I hung on the cable to see if I was level," Cruise said of that fateful last take. "I went all the way down on the floor, and I didn't touch! I was there holding it, and I'm sweating. [Brian] just keeps rolling ... and I'm like, 'I'm not going to stop.' Then I hear him off-camera start to howl [with laughter] and he goes, 'All right, cut!'" reality to it, and really grab the audience [with] the terrific tension he's under."

As the Art of the Scene breakdown notes , Cruise's choice to perform the stunt himself is one of the keys to its success, along with De Palma's choice to not "cheat" the action by cutting around his leading man. But there was one moment where cheating almost became necessary. In his new conversation with McQuarrie, Cruise revealed that he couldn't nail the pivotal moment where Krieger lets his grip on Hunt's rope slip to attend to a minor rat problem, and the agent plunges toward the pressure-sensitive floor, stopping barely an inch before his body would set off the alarm.

In reality, though, Cruise frequently didn't stop before hitting the ground. "I kept hitting my face," he confesses. As the blown takes continued to mount, De Palma warned Cruise that they'd have to move on and pick up the shot later. But the actor refused to give up and devised a novel way of keeping his body balanced — by putting one-pound coins in his shoes.

"I hung on the cable to see if I was level," Cruise said of that fateful last take. "I went all the way down on the floor, and I didn't touch! I was there holding it, and I'm sweating. [Brian] just keeps rolling... and I'm like, 'I'm not going to stop.' Then I hear him off-camera start to howl [with laughter] and he goes, 'All right, cut!'"

All that work paid off — Mission: Impossible dominated the Memorial Day weekend box office and finished its theatrical run with a worldwide gross of over $450 million. And the vault sequence was singled out as the film's crowning achievement. It certainly set the tone for what Cruise hoped to achieve with the rest of the series in terms of challenging himself to take part in bigger and better stunts... even when they resulted in major injuries .

"I hadn't done sequels, and I kind of had a rule not to do sequels," he said to McQuarrie, who, funnily enough, also collaborated with Cruise on another upcoming sequel — Top Gun: Maverick . "With Mission , I thought, 'It's a challenge for me.' We're working on the highest level because we have practical action [sequences]."

Mission: Impossible is currently streaming on Paramount+. The 25th anniversary Blu-ray is available on Amazon .

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Mission: Impossible

An American agent, under false suspicion of disloyalty, must discover and expose the real spy without the help of his organization. An American agent, under false suspicion of disloyalty, must discover and expose the real spy without the help of his organization. An American agent, under false suspicion of disloyalty, must discover and expose the real spy without the help of his organization.

Brian De Palma
Bruce Geller
David Koepp
Steven Zaillian
Emmanuelle Béart
583 User reviews
145 Critic reviews
59 Metascore
3 wins & 17 nominations

(as Emmanuelle Beart)

Sarah Davies
(as Kristin Scott-Thomas)

Drunken Female IMF Agent

Drunken Male IMF Agent
Kittridge Technician

TV Interviewer

CIA Analyst William Donloe

Max's Companion
Diplomat Rand Housman
Mayor Brandl
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Trivia While filming the famous scene where Tom Cruise drops from the ceiling and hovers inches above the ground, Cruise's head kept hitting the floor until he got the idea to put coins in his shoes for balance.
Goofs Although some would consider a computer room equipped with the three high-tech security systems, meant to prevent any intrusion, as missing the "most basic security measure" of video surveillance, video surveillance is often not permitted in highly classified areas where there is a risk that unauthorized personnel - such as the security personnel - may see the material. The security personnel may theoretically be cleared for that classification but they would not have a "need to know" the information contained within AND video surveillance visible in another area would defy the measures taken to keep the information in a secure room. However, a simple device to lock out the keyboard, of any other I/O devices or ports, when there was no authorised operator officially present, would be simple to implement, very efficient, and pose zero potential for information leakage.

Ethan Hunt : [sitting in an outdoor café] So, how does it feel to be a solid citizen again?

Luther Stickell : Man, I don't know. I'm gonna miss bein' disreputable.

Ethan Hunt : Well, Luther, if it makes you feel any better, I'll always think of you that way.

Crazy credits The opening credits contain several plot points from the movie.
Alternate versions The in-joke where Tom Cruise goes online with his laptop by typing in, not Usenet, but Crusenet, has been changed in the US DVD versions to where he types "internet access."
Connections Edited into Las Vegas: Father of the Bride (2006)
Soundtracks The Mission: Impossible Theme Written by Lalo Schifrin

User reviews 583

Feb 13, 2020
How long is Mission: Impossible? Powered by Alexa
The guard at the elevator didn't introduce himself so how did Ethan know he was a sergeant?
Why did Jim take the Gideon bible from the Drake hotel in Chicago and place it in the safe house in Prague?
How does Ethan have so much information on the room where the other half of the NOC list is kept?
May 22, 1996 (United States)
United States
Official Facebook
Nhiệm Vụ Bất Khả Thi
Charles Bridge, Old Town, Prague, Czech Republic (Jim's fall into the Vltava)
Paramount Pictures
Cruise/Wagner Productions
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$80,000,000 (estimated)
$180,981,856
$45,436,830
May 26, 1996
$457,696,391

Technical specs

Runtime 1 hour 50 minutes
Dolby Digital

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Breaking down the trailer for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

Tom Cruise is back as Ethan Hunt in a teaser for the action sequel. But who are all these people joining him for this latest impossible mission?

Senior Writer

Tom Cruise is back to battle baddies as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (out July 14, 2023), and the teaser trailer for this seventh film in the franchise was released today. Which new characters are joining our hero for his latest extremely difficult task? Which old ones are back from previous adventures? And does it feature the sight of Tom Cruise running? (Spoiler alert: it does!). You can read our full breakdown of the trailer below.

Welcome back to the world of Mission: Impossible!

Directed by longtime Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, the shoot for the new Mission: Impossible film took place in numerous locales, including the U.K., Italy, and Abu Dhabi. The opening moments of the trailer emphasize the globe-trotting nature of the movie as we see horses racing through a desert, a car hurtling through a European street, and a bike being ridden through some beautiful, likely British, countryside. We also see Ethan Hunt getting physical with some goons at the kind of super-cool nightclub that has never actually existed outside of the movies.

The return of Kittridge

The first half of the trailer features the voice of none other than actor Henry Czerny who played the character of Impossible Mission Force director Eugene Kittridge way back in Brian De Palma's original 1996 Mission: Impossible and has now returned to seemingly dissuade Hunt from his impossible mission-completing ways. "Your days of fighting for the so-called greater good are over," Kittridge says. "This is our chance to control the truth, the concepts of right and wrong for everyone for centuries to come. You're fighting to save an ideal that doesn't exist, never did. You need to pick a side."

Introducing the big bad

While Kittridge intones, we are introduced to some of the cast who are joining the franchise this time around including Esai Morales, who appears to be playing the film's villain (or one of them, anyway). Nicholas Hoult was originally cast in the role portrayed by Morales but, in March 2020, Variety reported that he was leaving the project because the movie's COVID-caused delays had caused a scheduling conflict for the Fury Road actor. Morales' previous credits include NYPD Blue and Ozark .

Look, it's Hayley Atwell!

The first half of the trailer also introduces, briefly, the characters played by Guardians of the Galaxy franchise star Pom Klementieff and her fellow Marvel star Hayley Atwell. Little is known at present about who either actress is playing but on the Light the Fuse podcast McQuarrie described Atwell's character as "a destructive force of nature." Later on in the trailer, we see another M:I newbie, Shea Whigham, from Boardwalk Empire and The Wolf of Wall Street . In an interview with the Radio Times earlier in the year, Whigham revealed that he is playing a character called Jasper Briggs, who is on the hunt for Hunt, and that he will also appear in the film's sequel. "You'll see over the course of seven and eight why I'm trying to track Ethan Hunt," he said. "It's one of the best things I've ever got a chance to be a part of."

Cruise close-up

We finally get a good look at our hero, Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt, who really doesn't seem to be taking Kittridge's lecture well. Then again, Hunt has good reason to be suspicious of people who present themselves as colleagues, with Henry Cavill's August Walker in 2018's Mission: Impossible – Fallout just being the most recent example of a character not to be trusted (although that mustache really should have tipped-off Ethan from the start).

The gang's all here!

In the course of the franchise, Hunt has gathered a band of collaborators seen here. Simon Pegg first played Benji Dunn in 2006's Mission: Impossible III ; Rhames' Luther was introduced in the very first film; and Rebecca Ferguson's MI6 agent Ilsa Faust arrived in 2015's Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation .

Training-day

One of the film's major action set-pieces takes place on a train, which can be taken as both a homage to Brian De Palma's original film and a reminder that there aren't many means of transportation that have not now featured in the franchise.

Leap of faith

The trailer saves its most spectacular sight for the last moment as we see Cruise's character ride a motorbike off a cliff. At last August's CinemaCon, Paramount showed footage of Cruise working with stuntmen to prepare to fly off the bike in mid-air and parachute to the ground. Writer-director McQuarrie called it not only the biggest stunt in the movie, but "by far the most dangerous stunt we've ever done."

Watch the trailer for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One below.

Here's when Tom Cruise's "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two" arrives in theaters

"Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One" introduces a major storyline about artificial intelligence.
Thankfully, you won't have to wait long to see that play out.
Tom Cruise and the cast are already filming "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two."

"Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One" pits Ethan Hunt ( Tom Cruise ) against a nefarious artificial intelligence that could be used as a terrifying weapon should it fall into the wrong hands. The entity itself can predict — and alter — anyone's life — even spies like Hunt and his team .

"Part One" follows Hunt as he searches for a key that will help neutralize the A.I. And because this is a "Mission: Impossible" movie, this involves putting himself in death-defying situations, like throwing himself off of a Norwegian mountain and fighting bad guy Gabriel (Esai Morales) on top of a train.

When is "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two" out?

The "Dead Reckoning Part Two" story remains somewhat of a mystery. However, it'll probably involve Hunt doing even bigger stunts to keep the A.I. on its toes while keeping the technology away from certain world powers who would use it for destructive purposes.

Thankfully, fans won't have too long to wait for "Part Two." It's set to arrive in theaters on June 28, 2024, with several new characters in tow.

Who's in the "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two" cast?

Tom Cruise will be joined by many of the "Dead Reckoning Part One" characters, including Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust, Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn, Ving Rhames as Luther Stickell, Esai Morales as Gabriel, Pom Klementieff as Paris, as well as Henry Czerny, who is reprising his role as Eugene Kittridge. He appeared in the first "Mission: Impossible" in 1996 before returning for 2023's "Part One."

Vanessa Kirby will also reprise her role as black market arms dealer Alanna Mitsopolis, alongside Shea Whigham as bounty hunter Jasper Briggs and Greg Tarzan Davis as Degas, Briggs' partner.

A few new faces are set to join "Dead Reckoning Part Two," including "Ted Lasso" star Hannah Waddingham and "Mindhunter" alumni Holt McCallany as Secretary of Defense Bernstein.

"The Last of Us" star Nick Offerman will also appear as a new character, while Rolf Saxon is reprising his role as CIA analyst William Donloe from the first film. He's the person the IMF poisons to gain access to a CIA vault so that Hunt can steal a list of known spies from a secure computer. We're looking forward to seeing how McQuarrie uses him in "Part Two."

Watch: How Tom Cruise pulled off 8 amazing stunts

Main content

Screen Rant

It took 6 months, but tom cruise finally something to cheer about with mission: impossible 7.

Mission: Impossible 7 didn't live up to expectations, but 6 months after its release, the movie has finally given Tom Cruise something to cheer about.

Despite falling short of expectations at the box office, Mission: Impossible 7 has received two Oscar nominations, a boost for Tom Cruise's franchise.
The nominations for Best Sound and Best Visual Effects highlight the strengths of the movie, even though they may not be the biggest categories.
While Mission: Impossible 7 may not have the same level of success as Cruise's previous film, Top Gun: Maverick, the nominations indicate that the franchise is on the right track.

The summer blockbuster, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One , didn't quite hit the heights expected of the film, but six months after its release, Mission: Impossible 7 has finally given Tom Cruise something to cheer about. Cruise is one of the most accomplished action actors in the industry and his Mission: Impossible series has been full of hits. Despite being around since 1996, the Mission: Impossible franchise has only continued to grow with the sixth installment becoming the highest-grossing film in the series. This set up big expectations for Dead Reckoning , expectations the movie ultimately fell short of.

Two of 2023's biggest movies came out just after Cruise's latest film, impacting Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning 's box office , which led to disappointment. The movie still reviewed well, but it also had some weaknesses and the fact it is a two-part movie makes the first part's weak box office all the more troublesome. While there hasn't been a lot to cheer about when it comes to Mission: Impossible 7 , its fortunes have begun to turn around. It may not have found the success it wanted, but Mission: Impossible 7 has now been recognized for some of its best qualities .

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One's Surprising Oscar Nominations Are A Boost For Tom Cruise's Movie

Despite the difficulties Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One faced, the movie has been nominated for two Oscars, which is a huge boost for Cruise's franchise. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One 's title may have been a mistake that lost the movie money, but it didn't stop it from being nominated at the Academy Awards. Mission: Impossible 7 was nominated for the Best Sound Oscar and Best Visual Effects , which may not be the biggest awards, but are still a sign of the movie's strengths. These nominations are positive signs for Dead Reckoning Part Two .

Oscar nominations are a great way to market the next film, showing that the first movie thrived in several areas. Other great films like John Wick 4 , The Iron Claw , and Saltburn didn't receive a single nomination, proving that Dead Reckoning at least has something worth celebrating. Sound and visual effects may not be the biggest categories, but this is still evidence that key elements of the movie were worthy of a nomination, especially as Mission: Impossible 7 wasn't expected to make much of a splash at the 2024 Oscars . This gives Cruise something to celebrate regarding his huge franchise.

Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning Cliffhanger Ending Explained

Mission: impossible - dead reckoning's oscars success still pales in comparison to cruise's previous movie.

Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible 7 may be up for multiple Oscars, but it is still a far cry from his previous movie. Top Gun: Maverick tripled Dead Reckoning 's nomination total , grabbing six nominations, including Best Picture. Not only was Top Gun: Maverick up for Best Picture, but it was one of the front-runners and won the Oscar for Best Sound. While Dead Reckoning could win more than Top Gun: Maverick , it looks unlikely the film will claim any awards. This would by no means be a failure, but it does show Cruise's Top Gun franchise looks stronger than Mission: Impossible .

The Oscar nominations prove how important the actor is to each franchise and replacing Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two or Top Gun 3 would be difficult. He is clearly crucial to both, but the box office and Oscar nominations indicate that Top Gun is currently the higher-quality franchise. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One may leave the Academy Awards without any wins, but the fact that it has received nominations is a good sign for the franchise, even if it pales in comparison to Cruise's previous success.

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning is an action-adventure spy thriller from director Christopher McQuarrie. It's the seventh entry in the Mission: Impossible series and a direct sequel to Mission: Impossible – Fallout. The title will star Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ving Rhames.

Tom Cruise Hits the Road in New 'Mission: Impossible 8' Set Images

Ethan Hunt is doing something dangerous for a change.

The Big Picture

Tom Cruise filmed a stunt scene for Mission: Impossible 8 in Middleton Mine, Derbyshire, UK.
The movie was initially titled Dead Reckoning: Part Two, but is now unnamed.
Director McQuarrie split the story into two parts for more character development and emotion.

Tom Cruise has been spotted in the United Kingdom, filming scenes for next year's Mission: Impossible 8 . The set photos show Cruise driving a jeep while filming—to the shock of nobody—what appears to be a stunt scene at the Middleton Mine in Derbyshire earlier in the week. The BBC reports that villagers in the surrounding areas have been informed that a film is being shot there, and that it would be used for what was described as a car chase sequence. Tarmac, the company that owns the mine, has previously offered out the site to production companies but did not confirm or deny what the film was when questioned.

The film has been back in production for a while in the UK, after the previous installment— Dead Reckoning —shot a large portion of the film in and around the Peak District and Derbyshire area, including a stunning steam train crash into a nearby quarry. Stars Simon Pegg and Hayley Atwell have also both shared photos on their personal Instagram accounts of nearby landmarks.

Is The New 'Mission: Impossible' Film 'Dead Reckoning Part Two'?

Originally entitled Dead Reckoning: Part Two , the film will be renamed. While "Part Two" is no longer in the title, director Christopher McQuarrie fully believes that this is the second of a two-part story, as he told Collider's Steve Weintraub at the film's premiere back in July.

"I knew I wanted to expand the cast, and I knew I wanted to give each one of those characters more to do, so I knew the movie was going to be bigger and longer than Fallout [ the previous movie]. And at which point I said, 'Why are we fighting this? Why are we going to try to jam this into two hours? Let's just break it in half and make it two movies.' That really was the rationale behind it being a two-part movie. It just it wasn't just that the story was bigger but that we wanted more emotion in the movie. At that time, the studio were actually very genuinely excited about it. And, you know, I think we were excited about it too. And then there were times when we were on set, and Tom would look at me, and he'd say, 'This was your idea. Just remember that.'”

Mission: Impossible's eighth installment is scheduled for release in May 2025. Stay tuned to Collider for updates and check out the new set images above.

Mission: Impossible 8

The 8th entry in the long running Mission Impossible franchise.

Watch on Paramount+

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The First Mission: Impossible Is Still the Best

If you told those of us who saw Mission: Impossible in theaters in 1996 that, 25 years later, the series would still be going strong, with Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt having outlasted two James Bonds, two Supermen, and three Batmen, we probably would have called you an idiot. It’s not that the movie (which, to celebrate its anniversary, has just been rereleased in a remastered new Blu-ray edition) wasn’t a sizable hit — it was — but it was also initially held at something of a remove by critics and audiences alike. It was the kind of smash-and-grab blockbuster that made a huge chunk of its box office in its opening few days and didn’t seem to care about word of mouth. That type of hit is, of course, pretty much all we have nowadays, but back in 1996, it wasn’t exactly a mark of quality.

Critics, who’d always been divided on the work of director Brian De Palma, saw Mission: Impossible as a movie that showcased his expertise with suspense, but one that didn’t have much personality to it. The action setpieces (mostly) received their share of praise, while the screenplay (credited to Robert Towne and David Koepp, and reportedly revised constantly throughout production) got knocked for being confusing or nonsensical. Many fans of the original series were disappointed that this new version was less about teamwork and spycraft and more about Tom Cruise jumping off exploding trains. (Some were also upset that this film decided to make Jim Phelps, the ostensible hero of the original show, a villain.) The then-small-but-growing ranks of the Extremely Online chuckled over the picture’s representation of how the internet works. Its CinemaScore grade was a mere B+ … which, in the world of hyperinflated CinemaScore grades, is generally cause for concern.

No, there was definitely something uncool about Mission: Impossible . It was somehow both too smart for its own good and also, weirdly, not smart enough. Besides, Tom Cruise: action star? What ? It’s hard to remember now, but Mission: Impossible was an odd choice at the time for the actor, who had built his stardom through a savvy combination of mainstream prestige pictures and pop hits but had never really been an ass-kicking action hero. In Top Gun , he flew jet fighters, while in Days of Thunder , he raced cars; in those movies, the action came from the machines, not the people. And despite his incredible box-office run, Cruise avoided sequels. Mission: Impossible , which he produced, seemed very much like the type of flick designed to establish a franchise, an odd choice for a performer whose white whale at the time was not so much box-office success as Oscar glory. (At the time, he’d only been nominated for 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July , though he’d starred in numerous Oscar-anointed films, such as A Few Good Men and Rainman . However, he’d soon be nominated for that year’s Jerry Maguire and, not long after, Magnolia . He still hasn’t won that Oscar.)

That odd choice would soon prove prophetic. It didn’t seem likely at the time that the industry would one day mostly abandon the star-driven, medium-budget hits that had been so important to Brand Cruise — that everything would eventually become subsumed into franchises and so-called IP, and that a star’s earning potential would become wedded to their ability to play the same, extremely familiar character over and over again in multiple installments of the same film series. Did Cruise himself recognize that this would become the way of the world? Probably not. He still had a good decade of star turns ahead of him . Jerry Maguire was still in the future, as were Minority Report and Collateral and War of the Worlds (and, of course, Magnolia , arguably his greatest performance). But one day, after his public image exploded , he’d wind up needing Mission: Impossible to help him claw back to relevance — and to some modicum of public affection.

In the period following the original’s release, however, you could sense the series struggling to find its footing. Mission: Impossible II , which came out four years later, was tonally very different from the first one. Director John Woo went for straight-up action ballet, with Cruise doing acrobatic gunplay while performing elaborate motorcycle stunts, the rest of his team essentially reduced to bit parts. Six years after that, the third entry, directed by J.J. Abrams, went dark and shaky-cam, entertainingly upping the explosions and the personal backstories. I would argue that the series didn’t fully hit its stride until 2011’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol , which in many ways restored the central idea that had made the original so effective.

So, what was that idea? And how has it endured so long? Is it just, you know, stunts ?

Not quite. Mission: Impossible delivered a new spin on properly utilizing what was then Cruise’s thermonuclear star power. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the actor represented a fresh-faced, can-do macho ethos; this was a far cry from the musclebound strongmen and grizzled wiseasses who dominated action cinema. But by the mid-’90s, the Age of Irony was fully upon us, and Cruise’s all-American appeal needed some complication. A little of this guy went a long way: Let Cruise be too confident, too capable, too smirking and cool, and you ran the risk of silliness and annoyance. (This is why Mission: Impossible II , by the way, for all its financial success, kind of stinks.) The man could no longer grin his way through his challenges.

The trick, it turned out, was to add a bit of slapstick. Tom Cruise was a handsome, physically gifted supernova with a thousand-watt smile, but the key to making him a relatable action star was, well, to humiliate him a little. The first Mission: Impossible gave us a hero whose confidence gets him into ridiculous situations that make him look foolish: What makes the infamous Langley break-in sequence so immortal isn’t the intricate derring-do of the heist itself; it’s the fact that Ethan Hunt winds up anxiously hovering two inches off the floor, desperately flapping his arms about — because there are few things more satisfying in modern mainstream cinema than the sight of Tom Cruise looking like a total dork. And weirdly, he seems to know it. For all the theatricality of his performances, Cruise is great at deadpan.

This might also be why De Palma made such an ideal director for this material, and for this star. No auteur was better at undercutting his protagonists, at turning his heroes into marks, cuckolds, dupes, and dopes. Mission: Impossible is much more of a Brian De Palma film than it gets credit for being. Certainly, the director loves the demonic artifice of cinema — his work simultaneously mines it for aesthetic power while purposefully highlighting its inherent phoniness — and with their vast array of costumes and masks and breakaway walls and falsified surveillance images, what are Ethan Hunt and his colleagues but a bunch of amateur filmmakers who also happen to be professional spies? Tied into this embrace of artifice is also a dedication to the old-school suspense setpiece — silent, carefully choreographed, focused on details — of the kind that these movies have deftly woven in with the more typical big bang-boom of modern action spectacle.

Ethan even becomes, for a while, one of De Palma’s classic sexual marks. The film isn’t just about Ethan and his team’s betrayal by their leader, Phelps (Jon Voight); it’s also about Ethan’s betrayal by Jim’s wife, Claire (Emmanuelle Béart), with whom he clearly has a romantic connection. By the end, when Ethan discovers that Claire has been working with Phelps all this time, the deception genuinely stings. A sex scene was reportedly shot and then cut from the finished film, but the point still comes across: It’s in Ethan and Claire’s longing glances, in their gentle kisses and caresses. Mission: Impossible played a little demure in 1996. Today, it feels downright heated.

Perhaps it’s this hybrid quality — as an action flick with a flair for the perverse and the intimate, a star vehicle with a deeply weird sensibility — that makes the first Mission: Impossibl e hold up so well. Perched at that moment, when everything in the industry began to change, it’s a surprisingly slippery movie, not quite one thing and not quite the other.

Still, who could have foreseen it? None of us predicted at the time that Mission: Impossible would one day be all that the once-indestructible Tom Cruise had. And none of us predicted that the franchise it spawned would wind up so perfectly balancing classic suspense with modern blockbuster bluster — that it would wind up being one of the more distinctive and refreshing series in a depressingly uniform landscape. None of us predicted that, one day, Mission: Impossible would be cool.

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My Impossible Mission to Find Tom Cruise

The action star has gone to great lengths to avoid the press for more than a decade. But maybe our writer could track him down anyway?

Credit... Illustration by Kelsey Dake

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By Caity Weaver

Published July 17, 2023 Updated July 31, 2023

In an interview with Playboy in 2012, Tom Cruise described Katie Holmes as “an extraordinary person” with a “wonderful” clothing line, and someone for whom he was fond of “doing things like creating romantic dinners” — behavior that, he confided, “she enjoys.” It would prove to be his last major interview with a reporter to date. Despite what may be recalled through the penumbra of memory, this sudden silence was not directly preceded by either of Cruise’s infamous appearances on television: not by his NBC’s “Today” show interview (in which he labeled host Matt Lauer both “glib” and “Matt — MattMattMattMatt”), nor even by his appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” (in which he reverse-catapulted himself onto Winfrey’s fawn-colored couch multiple times in a demonstration of his enthusiasm for Holmes). Those incidents occurred seven years earlier, in 2005; Cruise emerged from the hex of public bewilderment unscathed. In fact, Cruise gave no indication that the interview, pegged to the musical-comedy bomb “Rock of Ages,” was intended to serve as a farewell address to journalists. At the time he sat for it, another life milestone was hurtling toward him: The month after the article was published, Holmes filed for divorce.

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In the decade since, the amount of verified information we have gleaned about Cruise’s real life could fit on a single flashcard, though it’s unclear why anyone would need to memorize it, since the details mainly consist of anecdotal trifles shared by other celebrities in interviews of their own: From James Corden, we know Cruise once asked to land a helicopter in James Corden’s yard . From Brooke Shields, we know Brooke Shields no longer receives the (by all accounts delectable) white chocolate coconut Bundt cake that Cruise famously sends to many beloved stars each holiday season. From Kyra Sedgwick, we know that there was a panic button under a fireplace mantle in one of Cruise’s homes . (She pressed it out of curiosity, summoning the police.) From Matt Damon, we know that during production of the fourth “Mission: Impossible” movie, Cruise had “a safety guy” replaced because he deemed a proposed stunt (in which Cruise scampers over the Burj Khalifa) “too dangerous.” Tom Cruise, Kate Hudson informs us, loves skydiving.

These facts sketch a portrait of a daredevil with a finite budget for cakes, but hardly a recluse. Cruise’s spurning of interviews makes him unique among his cohort — A-list, pathologically charismatic, wrest-butts-into-seats-type movie stars — whose success, it has long been assumed, derives from their ability to appear likable to mortals. They demonstrate this skill, traditionally, by exhibiting their personality in interviews. Every time Cruise turns down an interview request (through his representative, Cruise declined to be interviewed for this article), he makes a bet that just his being Tom Cruise, offering no further details about what that might entail, is enticement enough for people to watch his movies. Lately, more often than not, he has been right.

To see this clearly, perhaps it’s helpful to contrast Cruise’s career with that of Brad Pitt, his co-star in “Interview With the Vampire” (1994) and fellow member of a declining species: Hollywood leading men. Pitt has continued appearing in the kind of films (thrillers, comedies, romances, psychodramas, historical epics, etc.) that he and Cruise starred in throughout the 1990s and 2000s. In the past decade, audiences could find Pitt endeavoring to disappear into roles ranging from abolitionist to astronaut. In the same period, Cruise has starred solely in action films, which have depicted him fighting aliens, terrorists, fellow spies, a mummy and sundry other enemies of the United States. Rather than vanishing into roles, Cruise remakes them in his image. So fully has he melded his offscreen persona with that of the skydiving, cliff-jumping, motorcycle-parachuting pilots he portrays, these characters become mere receptacles of Tom Cruiseness. Cruise’s films tend to perform better than Pitt’s at the box office; his most recent endeavor, “Top Gun: Maverick,” outearned Pitt’s latest by about $1.4 billion. This summer, Tom Cruise will run, drive and jump at top speeds in “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One,” and Brad Pitt will star in nothing.

Cruise still takes part in promotional junkets and convivial late-night-talk-show chats, but his refusal to participate in the sort of in-depth journalistic interviews that (in theory, anyway) reveal some aspect of his true self has coincided, somewhat paradoxically, with an incredible surge in his commitment to infusing cinematic fantasies with reality. For unknown reasons it could be interesting to explore in an interview, reality has become very important to Cruise, who reveres it as a force more powerful than magic. It is vital to Cruise that the audience of “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” have the opportunity to witness not a C.G.I. production of a feat, or even a seasoned stunt performer executing a dangerous act, but real footage of him, Tom Cruise, the 61-year-old father of three from Syracuse, N.Y., riding a motorcycle off a cliff.

This fetish for reality has become a keystone of Cruise’s persona, to the extent that many of his public appearances now take place in flying vehicles. Rather than accept an MTV Movie & TV Award in person in May, Cruise filmed his acceptance speech from the cockpit of a fighter aircraft as he piloted it through clouds, politely shouting, “I love entertaining you!” over the engine’s roar. Delivering “a special message from the set of @MissionImpossible” to his followers on Instagram, Cruise screamed while dangling backward off the side of an aircraft, “It truly is the honor of a lifetime!”

But reality does not exist only in movies. What is missing from Cruise’s fervid documentation of ultrarisky, inconceivably expensive, meticulously planned real-life events are any details about the parts of his real life that do not involve, for example, filming stunts for “Mission: Impossible” movies. My own mission, then, was simple: I was to travel to the ends of the Earth to see if it was possible to locate the terrestrial Cruise, out of context — to catch a glimpse, to politely shout one question at him, or at least to ascertain one new piece of intelligence about his current existence — in order to reintegrate him into our shared reality.

Having lately made an effort to scrutinize any article that cast Tom Cruise as its subject, one of the few things that I can say for certain he has done since 2021, besides film two “Mission: Impossible” movies, is order chicken tikka masala from a restaurant in Birmingham, England, and then “as soon as he had finished” (per a tweet from the restaurant ) order the exact same chicken tikka masala “all over again.”

These days, Tom Cruise is hardly ever photographed in any situation other than shooting and promoting his films. (He was filming in Birmingham.) The paucity of paparazzi photos of the apparently chicken-loving actor can be at least partly attributed to his spending much time removed from America’s twin celebrity-entertainment control rooms: New York (where his ex-wife, Holmes, lives with their daughter) and Los Angeles (where, in 2015 and 2016, he reportedly sold multiple homes for a combined total just over $50 million). Years of speculation that Cruise lives or was planning to live in a penthouse apartment a five-minute walk from the “spiritual headquarters” of the Church of Scientology, of which he is a big fan, in Clearwater, Fla., appear never to have been realized, apart from an unsourced assertion published in The Hollywood Reporter in 2018, which mentioned that the audition process for co-stars in Cruise’s “Top Gun: Maverick” “involved flying down to Cruise’s home in Clearwater. ”

To learn more about the possible activities of Tom Cruise, I turned to the person who, after Cruise himself, his family, his friends, his employees, his co-workers and anyone who has ever met — or, at least, interacted with — him, knows him best: a Brazilian woman who is quite possibly his most dedicated fan in the world. She spoke to me on two conditions: first, that I grant her anonymity; second, that I not identify by name, or characterize too specifically, the publicly available online repository of Cruise-related information she has maintained for over 20 years. Her concerns are both practical and legal: Practically, she isn’t sure if the operation, which may or may not play host to more than 132,000 images of Cruise, could withstand a large influx of traffic; legally, she did not wish to invite the scrutiny and possible copyright claims the attention might draw.

She started the operation when she was 18. Today she is in her early 40s and works as a librarian. More than two decades into the endeavor, a nostalgic melancholy permeates the fan’s reflections. Ten years ago, she said, she was often the first to widely disseminate the latest images of Cruise. Now, because of the superabundance of photo-sharing social media accounts, she must settle for merely having the most complete repository. New additions trickle in sporadically. She’s partial to the theory that paparazzi rarely capture photographs of Cruise in part because he is a real-life “master of disguise,” whom people fail to recognize on the street. Despite years of remote observation, of scrutinizing nearly every single image captured of the man, even she could not say definitively where Cruise lives. She did observe, however, that he appears to spend “most of the time” in Britain.

In fact, there is a strange rumor that Cruise bought a home in a tiny town called Biggin Hill, on the farthest fringes of London — the site of a small private airport that he has been known to use when filming in the region. The legend appears to trace back to an article published in the British tabloid The Sun in July 2021 about the actor’s 59th-birthday celebration. An anonymous source declared that Cruise had “only recently moved to” a house in Biggin Hill (average home price: £590,000), “which feels like it’s practically in the countryside.” The claim would accrue scant new details as it was repeated in British papers numerous times over the following year, apart from one: that Cruise’s residence “is set in 140 acres of stunning rural parkland,” inside a posh gated community near the airport.

Cruise, who has filmed parts of the three most recent installments of “Mission: Impossible” in Britain, has never publicly commented on the rumors. He did, however, confirm that he spends “a lot of time in Britain” in an exceedingly rare interview that appeared, inexplicably, in the September 2022 issue of Derbyshire Life magazine. “I guess I am an Anglophile,” Cruise told Derbyshire Life. “I love being in Britain because everyone is pleasant and will give you a nod or say hello without crowding you too much.” Elsewhere in the interview, Cruise expressed additional enthusiasm for auxiliary British topics, including politeness (“Being friendly doesn’t cost a bean, and I enjoy it”) and Derbyshire, which is, for the record, actually a considerable distance from Biggin Hill (“Wow! Derbyshire — what a fantastic place!”).

To determine if anyone who did not work in the British newspaper or chicken-tikka-masala industries had ever encountered Cruise on English soil, I sifted through Facebook posts, typing any permutation of “saw Tom Cruise” I could think of into the search bars of neighborhood groups for all of the Hobbit-ily named localities surrounding Biggin Hill (“Orpington”; “West Wickham”). I joined groups like “Westerham and Biggin Hill News friends Community fun views gossip” and pored over hundreds of responses to posts like “Think I just saw Tom Cruise driving down jail lane that’s impossible.” The flashes of Cruise that winked from the replies were tantalizing — “I’ve seen him blue Ferrari…jail lane…”; “Lives up Cudham drives blue Ferrari” — but there was no way to tell who was reporting accurate details about the comings and goings of Tom Cruise, who was mistaken and who was merely lying for fun. The only way to find out was to do what Cruise himself would do: grab onto the nearest plane and go, for real.

Next to the Biggin Hill Airport, there is a pocket-size hotel built to serve the crews and engineers of the private planes that fly in and out. The hotel, its website boasts, offers “great views towards London” — something just about any place on Earth could offer with the right window arrangement, assuming it was not already in London. The description of the property’s sleek teal-and-toffee-colored restaurant turned out to be even more specifically accurate: The view of the runway at Biggin Hill Airport was without parallel. At the bar, I pulled up a leather stool and ordered (not in these exact words) the worst Shirley Temple of my life, which cost $11. My fellow patrons had long since familiarized themselves with the contours of the small dinner menu; they had been stranded at Biggin Hill for some time, because the private jet of the billionaire for whom they were working had received — you hate to hear this — an estimated $10 million worth of hail damage. I asked a maintenance technician if he thought Tom Cruise really did have a house in Biggin Hill. He replied with unflinching confidence: “I know he does.”

In the same venue, a man so young he might have been a teenager, who at one time worked inside the airport, revealed to me that Cruise had a parking spot there, though it was unclear if he meant for a car or a helicopter. Most of the good people of Biggin Hill, when grilled about Cruise’s living arrangements, seemed genuinely to have no idea what I was talking about. These were the two camps into which, without fail, every respondent fell: Either they had never so much as heard the rumor that Cruise walked among them, or they were 100 percent certain that he did.

Upon reaching Keston Park, the only gated community in the area matching The Sun’s description, I discovered two things: first, that there appeared to be an illegally locked gate obstructing public access to the footpath that cuts through the neighborhood — whether the gate is impenetrable is a matter of ongoing dispute among the Bromley borough council, myself and many other aspiring path-takers who have submitted complaints about the locked gate to the borough website — and, second, that the biggest movie star in the world did not live there. That was evident through holes that carpenter bees had bored into the barbed-wire-topped fences protecting Keston Park from the wider world. The stately houses faced one another too directly. Their trees could drop acorns into another’s gardens. There was nowhere to conveniently land a helicopter.

Oh, well. These were Keston Park’s problems — not mine and probably not Tom Cruise’s. Tom Cruise, as he and I both now knew, was most likely secretly living at another estate I had turned up in my research — one that was even closer to the airport.

The distance between any two points within the general environs of Biggin Hill is insignificant by car, which is probably why I was unable to persuade any taxi driver to transport me between them. It is less insignificant by foot, and even longer, though much more scenic, if one attempts to traverse it by way of the aforementioned footpaths. These meandering trails tended to be spectacularly beautiful, bursting with a vernal lushness that was nearly pornographic. House-high frozen fountains of eensy white hawthorn blossoms shaded dusty walkways. Wild roses as pink as Country Time lemonade exploded from leafy hedges. Fragile sapphire speedwells, fat purple clover tops and buttercups strewn like gold confetti — these were merely the things it was impossible not to step on. The fluorescent green of the meadows recalled the grasses of another royal province — Super Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom. Poppies and toadflax sprang out obscenely from stone walls. Tom Cruise would be crazy not to live here , I thought as I stroked the soft, sun-warmed mane of a little white donkey. Let’s all live here .

Except, upon my arrival at the end of an idyllic woodland stroll, I discovered that Cruise did not live there either. There was, in the front yard of this residence, a garden gnome lugging buckets on a yoke, which didn’t seem like Cruise’s style, and the gnome was overturned, lying on its side — definitely not his style. I righted the gnome and ambled on, in search of another public footpath that would, I hoped, lead me to where Cruise actually lived. Instead, I accidentally wandered into what (I learned through being yelled this information) was not a public right of way but a field privately owned by a woman who berated me until I ran into traffic on a nearby road.

That night, with half my allotted exploratory mission time used up, I lay awake in the hotel built for the flight attendants of billionaires’ jets, miserable and panicked at my failure to do anything but incur thousands of dollars in expenses for airfare and one Shirley Temple. Surely this wasn’t all for naught; surely some meaning could possibly be derived from an interaction between a movie star and a magazine journalist — even a brief one, even one in which the movie star had already said (through his publicist) he did not wish to participate, even one in which the star was not present, since some understanding of some dimension of his life could doubtless be gleaned through a study of his surroundings. But what if Cruise has been so successful in removing himself from our world that I would never find any trace of him? What if Cruise had evanesced into a high-octane mist of pure entertainment? Did I have time to just go to every single house in England and check if Cruise was home? How big was this nation? Why was the sun rising now, in the middle of the night? What time was it?! Had I accidentally not gone to sleep all night?

I had one more idea.

On my first day in town, I had stopped at a pub for lunch. I was told that there was a funeral going on and that there was an hour wait for food, but that if I ordered something simple like a sandwich, the wait would be less, so I ordered a sandwich, which actually took 90 minutes to arrive and was so, no offense, disgusting-tasting that I turned around and asked a middle-aged man sitting at the picnic table behind mine if he would like half a sandwich (no) and if it always took so long to receive a sandwich at this pub (unclear) and if it was true that Tom Cruise really lived nearby. “He’s here,” the man said to me.

“Do you know?” I asked. “Or are you guessing?”

“He’s definitely around here, that’s for sure,” he said. “I know where he is.”

At first, with the cagey pride of one who knows the favored hovering spot of an actual ghost, who acts as self-appointed doorman of the thin place between worlds, the man made a show of not telling me where. But then, on his way out, he materialized at my elbow and proffered three “clues” (his word).

“It’s within two miles of the airport,” he said. “Look for the biggest house. And I mean — ” his voice dropped to a whisper, “ — the biggest .”

“It’s a very famous house,” he said. “The anti-establishment of slavery started there.”

I was aware of this property from my earlier research. It was a colossal butter-colored manor once owned by a prime minister, William Pitt the Younger. I had eliminated it from contention as a possible Cruise residence because it was sold in 2018 (£8.5 million) to a used-car magnate who, at least judging by an article from 2020 that I read in Car Dealer magazine, appeared to be quite comfortably ensconced in it. But it was only a few miles away. On foot, the journey could be completed in just over an hour.

How, exactly, I ended up on the edge of that woman’s privately owned field again, I have no idea. The expedition to that point had seemed to take me through brand-new areas. All of a sudden, I noticed that the path had dissipated into dense forest. This is just like what happened yesterday, when I trespassed in that woman’s field, I thought, then looked up and spotted her house in the distance.

I panicked. I frightened a badger — likewise, babe! — and bolted through the forest as quickly as I could in a new, randomly chosen direction. This deposited me into a vast, previously unencountered field. On all previous paths, vigorously growing cow parsley had stood on slender stems, about shin high. Here, upright hordes of it grazed my shoulders, while fallen comrades entangled my ankles. Needles of true panic pricked my nape under sweaty hair. Statistically speaking, I assured myself, it was unlikely I would be trapped in this field so long that I would die there.

Although — wouldn’t it serve that woman right if I did die in this field, so close to her own, where I was not allowed? “That would teach her a lesson,” I said into the audio recorder I had brought in case I encountered Tom Cruise. Have to “find some way to notify her,” I explained. (Of my death.) Hopefully she would see my picture in a — newspaper! That would be another good thing about dying out here, I told the recorder. It would “serve” the editor who recklessly assigned me this article — who had irresponsibly approved my travel budget — “right.” It would probably ruin his life, or at least his work life. God, would he be fired? Certainly, at the very least, he would get in trouble. You should never have sent her to a small English town . Would our boss tell him not to blame himself? Hopefully not — I am dead because of him! I didn’t want to die, of course — but if it did happen, at least I would die doing what I loved: making people feel bad and be in trouble deservedly. I had yet to clearly develop a mental image of my widowed husband’s second wife when I realized that I had stumbled, midfield, upon a dirt path leading into a neighborhood. I ran down it — in, I was shocked to discover, the exact direction of the used-car dealer’s palatial estate.

The public footpath alongside the property — which, if a man drinking outside a pub at 2 p.m. is to be believed, is inhabited by Tom Cruise — looked like the aisle down which a fairy princess would glide at her wedding. Actually, no, even nicer: It was like the flower-strewn tunnel of light she would pass through following her death (from being viciously yelled at for walking in a private field BY ACCIDENT) on her journey to eternity. It wound beneath protective arches of graceful branches trailing heaps of white and pink blossoms. A gentle, constant wind rippled the flowers just enough to allow dappled sunlight to illuminate a trail through their lovely shade. So vast were the grounds, so lush the foliage, that the home itself was not visible from any vantage point. I listened for the distant throaty cry of a blue Ferrari, but heard only bird song.

The recorded owner of the estate made no response to my later attempts to contact him, to ask if, perchance, Tom Cruise (possibly in elaborate disguise) could be living in his house. Even if Cruise has no connection to the residence, this absolute lack of response serves to further obscure his existence. Not only is it impossible to determine where he lives — it isn’t even possible to determine where he does not live. The distance between Cruise and the average human remains unshrinkable. At a time when social media renders movie stars ever-present in the public field of vision — accessible to some extent through whatever scrupulously vetted personal information they share, but also broadly trackable via webs of celebrity-watching accounts that widely disseminate photos and rumors — Cruise has distinguished himself by becoming a comet. When, between protracted absences, his inscrutable orbit brings him back into Earth’s visible realm, he briefly commands the simultaneous attention of all its peoples: “Thank you to the people of Abu Dhabi,” read a June post on his Instagram account, alongside a photo of him greeting a crowd at a “Dead Reckoning Part One” premiere. (Also appreciated and acknowledged by their servant-sovereign for their attendance at other “Dead Reckoning Part One” premieres: “the people” of Rome; “everyone” in Seoul.)

At the conclusion of this promotional cycle, after Cruise has thanked everyone for allowing him to create world-class summer cinema, he will almost certainly disappear, not to be heard from again until next year, at which point his re-emergence will proclaim the arrival of “Dead Reckoning Part Two.” This vanishing, while perhaps rooted in avoidance of a press corps that asks questions he doesn’t want to answer, is massaged into something like a sacrificial duty to audiences. In disappearing the moment his work is through — always, like Santa Claus, with the promise of return — Cruise retains the mystique that so many Hollywood stars have lost this century. He goes away so that audiences may experience the thrill of his reappearance, and delight in the promise of movie magic he heralds.

Of course, it is possible that Tom Cruise does not even know that the gargantuan house in the quiet English village exists. But if we assume, perhaps foolishly, that he does live there, I did ascertain one new detail about his reality: He was in the process of having the long private driveway that weaves through the woods and stretches to the unseen manor beyond redone. It looks awesome.

Caity Weaver is a staff writer for the magazine. She last wrote about going on a package trip for youngish people.

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the plane from which Tom Cruise accepted an MTV Movie & TV Award. It was a fighter aircraft, not a fighter jet.

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Severance Star Joins Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible 8

The cast of Mission: Impossible 8 continues to grow.

Tramell Tillman , known for his breakout role in the popular Apple series Severance , has secured a role in the eighth installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise. The film was previously titled Dead Reckoning Part Two and is no longer using that title.

Per THR , Tillman received SAG and Spirit Award nominations for his performance in Severance , where he starred alongside Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette and John Turturro. Tillman is set to return for the second season of the series. His other screen credits include Dietland , Godfather of Harlem , and Hunters.

Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible 8 Faces a Disruptive On-Set Villain - Sheep

Tillman will be joining a cast of Mission: Impossible franchise newcomers including Katy O’Brian , Nick Offerman, and Hannah Waddingham, as well as returning Mission veterans Henry Czerny, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Pom Klementieff, and Vanessa Kirby. Plot details including Tillman’s character are being kept under wraps . Tom Cruise is producing the film for Paramount and Skydance, with Christopher McQuarrie directing. Executive producers include David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger, and Chris Brock.

The Eighth Movie Is in the Works

In January 2019, Cruise announced that the seventh and eighth Mission: Impossible films would be shot back-to-back, with McQuarrie writing and directing both. Plans for the film later changed in February 2021. Filming began in March 2022 in the United Kingdom and included other locations such as Malta, South Africa, and Norway. The release date for the sequel was moved from June 28, 2024, to May 23, 2025. Production faced delays due to Cruise and his team promoting the release of Dead Reckoning Part One during the summer and the SAG-AFTRA strike that started in July 2023, resuming in March 2024.

Mission Impossible 8 Director Shares a Look at a Jaw-Dropping Stunt

The eighth installment of the franchise will have a three-week run in IMAX and will be filmed using IMAX digital cameras for the digital format. In contrast, Dead Reckoning Part One only had a one-week run in IMAX due to Oppenheimer opening the following week with a guaranteed three-week run in the format.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One concluded with a major cliffhanger, suggesting that Ethan Hunt and his team are embarking on one of their most dangerous missions yet in their pursuit to find and destroy The Entity. Behind-the-scenes shots from the set indicate that the upcoming installment will feature high-stakes action scenes, consistent with previous films in the franchise. Mission: Impossible 8 is unlikely to be the final film in the series, as McQuarrie has hinted at a ninth entry in the future.

The untitled eighth Mission: Impossible film is scheduled for release in the United States on May 23, 2025.

Source: THR

Mission: Impossible 8

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Tom Cruise Speed-Flying at Over 50 Miles per Hour Left ‘Mission: Impossible 7’ Crew in ‘Absolute Terror’: One of the World’s ‘Most Dangerous Sports’

By Zack Sharf

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Riding a motorcycle off the edge of a cliff is not the only death-defying stunt Tom Cruise pulls off in the upcoming “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.” A new featurette on the making of the Paramount action tentpole reveals Cruise learned how to speed-fly, which director Christopher McQuarrie calls “one of the most dangerous sports in the world.”

“While it may look similar, speed-flying is not skydiving,” the filmmaker said. “Skydiving is fairly predictable. Speed-flying is very unpredictable.”

Popular on Variety

“It’s a very beautiful and delicate sport,” Cruise said of speed-flying. “We’re gonna do spirals, and we’re landing at an incredibly high speed, over 80 kilometers an hour.”

While McQuarrie agreed that speed-flying looks beautiful, he added, “Behind the scenes we were all in absolute terror.”

While Cruise risked his life racing down the sides of mountains while speed-flying, the infamous motorcycle stunt remains the most death-defying act in “Dead Reckoning Part One.” Cruise rode a motorcycle off the edge of a cliff and parachuted to safety on the first day of filming. The actor wanted it that way, as his survival would’ve determined the rest of filming on the $200 million tentpole.

“Well we know either we will continue with the film or we’re not. Let’s know day one!” Cruise recently told Entertainment Tonight about filming the stunt at the very start of production. “Let us know day one what is going to happen: Do we all continue or is it a major rewrite?”

“I was training and I was ready,” Cruise added. “You have to be razor sharp when you’re doing something like that. It was very important as we were prepping the film that it was actually the first thing. I don’t want to drop that and go shoot other things and have my mind somewhere else. Everyone was prepped. Let’s just get it done.”

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Tom Cruise Comments On The 'Weirdest' On Set 'Mission: Impossible' Rumor: Are People Allowed To...

Posted: April 25, 2024 | Last updated: April 25, 2024

There are major movie stars, and then there’s Tom Cruise. The 61 year-old A-lister is showing no signs of slowing down. Cruise recently commented on the “weirdest” rumor about his behavior on the set of "MI." Namely, are people allowed to look him in the eye during filming? Once you’re an A-list celebrity, you can demand or request a variety of things in order to properly get your work done. There are rumors that celebrities like Ellen Degeneres don’t want actors or crew members looking them in the eye on set, presumably to help maintain focus. Tom Cruise has seemingly heard those rumors about him, and actually name dropped them in an interview with The Times about his public image. After claiming they were the “weirdest” rumor he’d heard about himself, his "Mission: Impossible" co-star Simon Pegg came to his defense.

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IMAGES

WATCH: Tom Cruise Performs Wild Stunts in 'Mission: Impossible
Mission: Impossible (1996)
Tom Cruise: "Mission: Impossible"-Filme bis ins hohe Alter
How Mission: Impossible 1 Changed Tom Cruise's Career Forever
Mission: Impossible 7 Trailer Is Here To Remind You About Tom Cruise's
Mission: Impossible 7 Almost Opened With a De-aged Tom Cruise

COMMENTS

'Mission: Impossible' Franchise Explained: All Seven Movies
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Cruise has always steered Mission: Impossible towards success, empowering filmmakers like J.J. Abrams and Brad Bird to bring their own passions and points of view to the table, resulting in ...
Mission: Impossible (film series)
Mission: Impossible is a series of American action spy films, based on the 1966 TV series created by Bruce Geller.The series is mainly produced by and stars Tom Cruise, who plays Ethan Hunt, an agent of the Impossible Missions Force (IMF). The films have been directed, written, and scored by various filmmakers and crew, while incorporating musical themes from the original series by Lalo Schifrin.
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Mission: Impossible (1996)
Mission: Impossible: Directed by Brian De Palma. With Tom Cruise, Jon Voight, Emmanuelle Béart, Henry Czerny. An American agent, under false suspicion of disloyalty, must discover and expose the real spy without the help of his organization.
Mission: Impossible 7 trailer: Diving deep into the new cast members
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Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Stars, Director Talk AI Villain
In Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, Tom Cruise and his Impossible Missions Force face off against an all-powerful rogue form of artificial intelligence, known as The Entity, which ...
Tom Cruise and the 'Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One' cast
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The summer blockbuster, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, didn't quite hit the heights expected of the film, but six months after its release, Mission: Impossible 7 has finally given Tom Cruise something to cheer about. Cruise is one of the most accomplished action actors in the industry and his Mission: Impossible series has been full of hits.
Tom Cruise Hits the Road in New 'Mission: Impossible 8' Set Images
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Ethan Hunt
The John Warner School. Ethan Matthew Hunt is a fictional character and the protagonist of the Mission: Impossible film series. He is portrayed by Tom Cruise. The character of Ethan Hunt is a highly skilled field agent and operative for the Impossible Mission Force (IMF), a secret government agency that handles dangerous and high-stakes missions.
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