black tom cruise pilot

Is Tom Cruise a real pilot? All about his flying dream

by Chege Karomo
– on May 26, 2022
in People

Tom Cruise returns for the second installment of Top Gun , which promises to be an improvement on the first one. However, before the film’s premiere, Cruise teamed up with television host and actor James Corden to promote the movie. In 2018, Tom took James skydiving; in 2022, Tom strapped him into a plane piloted by the Mission Impossible star.

“I’m gonna go up in a 75-year-old plane with someone who isn’t a pilot? Yeah, that sounds like a good idea,” Corden protested .

If it were another actor, it’d be difficult to believe that they were a pilot. However, given Tom Cruise’s penchant for performing his own stunts, it’s pretty easy to fathom Cruise having a pilot’s license.

Tom Cruise has held a pilot’s license since 1994

Tom Cruise qualified as a pilot in 1994, nearly three decades ago. Cruise reportedly owns several planes, including a luxury Gulfstream jet and his beloved P-51 Mustang, a WWII fighter that’ll appear in Top Gun .

“The P-51 Mustang you see in the movie is actually my plane, so I got to pilot in those sequences,” Cruise told Hello magazine . “I also got to be in the jet fighter a lot more this time, which was thrilling. It was something I had been working up to.”

Cruise told the outlet that Top Gun allowed him to fulfill two dreams: flying and acting. “All I ever wanted to be was a pilot or an actor, so Top Gun was a huge moment in so many respects, including my passion for aviation,” Cruise said. “I got to actually fly in an F-14 jet which was a dream come true, and play a character I loved in Maverick.”

Tom told the PA News Service that he advocated for realism in the new Top Gun , translating to as little computer trickery as possible. For Cruise, a man with a decades-old flying license, flying would be easy, but the rest of the cast needed intense training.

For three months, the actors developed skills crafted by Cruise and learned how to film while inside the aircraft. However, few can match Tom Cruise, as Miles Teller admitted that he never got used to the feeling:

“We trained for this for a long time, Tom had us in a flight programme for several months before we ever started filming. But it was never something you really ever got, like, super comfortable with, at least for me. It was something that every time I went up, it really tested me and I felt like I wanted to puke pretty much every time.”

Cruise didn’t get to fly the F-18 Super Hornet in Top Gun

Cruise may be an experienced pilot, but the military doesn’t hand the keys to one of their most prized assets to anyone with a flying license.

The military hasn’t given a reason why it didn’t offer Cruise the F-18 Super Hornet, but we think money has a lot to do with it. The jet costs $70 million, nearly half of the film’s $152 budget. Few insurers would accept to insure potential damage of such an aircraft.

Furthermore, despite having a pilot’s license, Cruise may not have the requisite skill to fly an F-18 safely – placing one in his hands would put lives at risk. The crew and cast filmed using real F-18 jets driven by trained Navy pilots.

Read Next: Is The Darkstar a real plane? Its real-life inspirations explained

What is claudia doumit’s ethnicity the actor’s middle eastern roots, where is maia campbell now her battle with drug abuse and bipolar disorder, what is daniel daggers’ ethnicity the real estate mogul’s jewish roots, what is lolo wood’s ethnicity the model’s african american roots.

Cast & crew
User reviews

American Made

The story of Barry Seal, an American pilot who became a drug-runner for the CIA in the 1980s in a clandestine operation that would be exposed as the Iran-Contra Affair. The story of Barry Seal, an American pilot who became a drug-runner for the CIA in the 1980s in a clandestine operation that would be exposed as the Iran-Contra Affair. The story of Barry Seal, an American pilot who became a drug-runner for the CIA in the 1980s in a clandestine operation that would be exposed as the Iran-Contra Affair.

Gary Spinelli
Domhnall Gleeson
Sarah Wright
390 User reviews
293 Critic reviews
65 Metascore
3 nominations

'American Made' Trailer With Director's Commentary

Top cast 99+

Monty 'Schafer'

Sheriff Downing

Judy Downing

Dana Sibota

Jorge Ochoa

James Rangel

Agent Craig McCall

Louis Finkle

Carlos Lehder
(as Fredy Yate Escobar)

Pablo Escobar

Oliver North

Manuel Noriega
Adolfo Calero
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

Trivia Tom Cruise is a qualified pilot. He did all of his own flying scenes during filming.
Goofs Barry Seal did not quit his job at TWA. In July of 1972 he was fired for taking fraudulent medical leave in order to participate in an explosives smuggling operation.

Barry Seal : I'm the gringo who always delivers.

Crazy credits At the very end of the credits, tucked among the copyright disclaimers is the sentence, "And yes, we know that's not El Salvador." This is a reference to a joke in the film about mistaking El Salvador for Nicaragua on the map. In fact, the country on the map was neither El Salvador nor Nicaragua, it was Honduras.
Connections Featured in Half in the Bag: The Mummy (2017)
Soundtracks A Fifth of Beethoven Written & Performed by Walter Murphy Courtesy of BMG Rights Management

User reviews 390

antoniotierno
Sep 2, 2017
How long is American Made? Powered by Alexa
What are the rumours surrounding Barry Seal and how much truth is there in them?
September 29, 2017 (United States)
United States
Barry Seal, sólo en América
Ball Ground, Georgia, USA (Mena, Arkansas)
Cross Creek Pictures
Imagine Entertainment
Quadrant Pictures
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$50,000,000 (estimated)
$51,342,000
$16,776,390
Oct 1, 2017
$134,866,593

Technical specs

Runtime 1 hour 55 minutes
Dolby Digital
Dolby Surround 7.1
Dolby Atmos

More to explore

Simple Flying

What planes does tom cruise own.

Your changes have been saved

Email is sent

Email has already been sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

Which Airport’s Runways Are Furthest From The Terminal?

Ultra-long-haul: a look at singapore airlines' 5 longest routes, why airbus is winning with fleet commonality.

Tom Cruise is a licensed pilot with qualifications as a multi-engine instrument-rated pilot and helicopter flying skills.
Cruise owns a collection of airplanes, including a vintage P-51 Mustang fighter from World War II and a Gulfstream IV G4 jet.
There may be additional aircraft in Cruise's fleet, such as a HondaJet and a Bombardier Challenger 300 jet, according to a travel expert.

It wasn't just a show for 'Top Gun.' Tom Cruise is one of the few actors who genuinely love aviation. He has been a licensed pilot since 1994 and is able to fly several types of aircraft. However, it doesn't stop with a license. The famous Hollywood actor also has a collection of airplanes varying from vintage fighters to business jets.

What kind of license does Cruise have?

In various discussions, Tom Cruise has revealed that his affinity for aviation was crucial to his initial attraction to the original 'Top Gun.' He shared that he holds qualifications as a multi-engine instrument-rated pilot and has continued to enhance his skill set throughout his life. Notably, he acquired helicopter flying skills for the remarkable stunts seen in the 2018 film 'Mission Impossible: Fallout.'

Plane collection

North American P-51 Mustang fighter

During a segment on The Late Late Show, Cruise took host James Corden for a ride in his own vintage P-51 Mustang fighter plane. Tom Cruise acquired this World War II fighter in 2001, which was initially built in 1946.

The P-51 Mustang was an American long-range fighter bomber that served alongside other conflicts during World War II and the Korean War. It was developed by North American Aviation and was retired in 1984. Nevertheless, even today, the fighter is utilized for air racing by civilian pilots. After being donated to an Illinois museum, the plane underwent restoration in 1997.

Get the latest aviation news straight to your inbox: Sign up for our newsletters today.

Making his recent performance in ' Top Gun: Maverick ,' Tom Cruise takes to the skies in the P-51 Mustang fighter. What adds intrigue to this is the revelation that he wasn't just portraying the pilot on screen – he was actually at the controls of his very own P-51 Mustang fighter.

Gulfstream IV G4 jet

With an estimated price tag of $20 million, this jet boasts the capability to accommodate as many as 19 passengers. Notably, it reportedly comes furnished with luxuries, including a jacuzzi and a dedicated movie-screening room, according to Business Insider.

The Gulfstream IV G4 is a long-range executive jet designed and built by Gulfstream , a General Dynamics company based in Savannah, Georgia, United States, from 1985 until 2018. Its production spanned from 1985 to 2018, resulting in over 900 G4 units taking to the skies. This jet can cover distances of up to 7,100 kilometers and achieve a top speed of 850 kilometers per hour.

Is there more?

Whether the actor has more aircraft in its fleet has been under speculation as it was never officially confirmed. But according to a Business Insider report, in addition to the vintage fighter jet and the Gulfstream IV G4, Jack Sweeney, who is famous for reporting the travel habits of numerous celebrities, including Elon Musk, said he has been able to identify Cruise's HondaJet and a Bombardier Challenger 300 jet.

Want answers to more key questions in aviation? Check out the rest of our guides here .

Sources: Business Insider , South China Morning Post

North America

‘Top Gun: Maverick’ stars hope the film’s Black pilots will inspire a new generation of fans

Actor Jay Ellis remembers watching the 1986 movie “Top Gun” at an Air Force base in Austin, Texas. He was only 8 or 9 years old, and the blockbuster made him dream about becoming a fighter pilot. Ellis wanted to be part of that military community.

Now, he plays Navy fighter pilot Payback in the anticipated sequel “Top Gun: Maverick,” which releases nationwide Friday and in select theaters starting Tuesday. He said he sees the film as a way to say thank you to the real men and women who inspired him as a boy.

“I grew up around aviation, and I think about the sacrifice that so many men and women take — they give, rather — just for us to be safe,” he said. “I think we all wrap our arms around this community and we protect it so much. And we understand the responsibility to be amazing on-screen for these folks.”

Both of Ellis' grandfathers, his step-grandfather and his father were in the Air Force, so telling the story about a community of aviators is important to him. He said he thinks the first “Top Gun” was a worldwide success because few people knew about Navy pilots.

“I think seeing yourself on-screen always is something that people lean into,” he said. “We knew that people flew in jets and protected this country in that way. But we didn’t know the ways in which they get chosen and how they trained to do it.”

Thirty-six years later, the sequel aims to continue that story, drawing fans back in with Tom Cruise reprising his role as Maverick.

In “Top Gun: Maverick,” he returns to the naval flight academy to train a new class of pilots. One of those pilots is Rooster (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s former wingman, Goose (Anthony Edwards), who died in the first film after ejecting from an F-14 plane.

Representation on screen and in history

Actor Greg Tarzan Davis, who plays the fighter pilot Coyote in the sequel, said he hopes this film will inspire a new generation of viewers. He said showing a Black Navy pilot with other diverse pilots on the big screen is an important milestone.

“When I saw the first ‘Top Gun,’ obviously there was one Black character, Sundown, but I don’t think he was represented as fully as he could have been,” he said. “So I think that it’s really cool that we have the representation, not just of Black characters, but of many different men and women.”

While Black people have been involved in the U.S. military since its earliest stages, the combat roles portrayed in the film were not available to Black Americans until recent decades.

“The Navy, like all American services, was very resistant to having Black Americans in any position that was oriented towards combat and wanted to keep them in service positions like mess hall attendants,” military historian David Silbey said.

Silbey pointed out that the racial stereotyping of Black people and other nonwhite groups in the military also hindered their paths to equality in civilian life.

“The idea that they were not able to handle the responsibility of combat has a political implication,” he said. “When you relegate nonwhite people from specially valorous positions, you are implicitly undercutting any political claim they could have later on.”

The Navy’s first decorated Black service member was Doris Miller , a mess attendant aboard the USS West Virginia, which was anchored at Pearl Harbor during the attack by the Japanese in 1941. He carried wounded sailors from the ship to safety and then manned an anti-aircraft gun, shooting at the attacking planes until he was forced to abandon ship. He had never received any training for that type of combat.

“His job was to serve food to officers. He wasn’t supposed to be in a combat position,” Silbey said. “In spite of his bravery, Miller doesn’t get the Medal of Honor,” the highest award for military valor, “but the Navy Cross.”

He was killed two years later aboard the USS Liscome Bay when a torpedo hit the ship.

In 1948, following World War II, President Harry Truman signed an executive order ending racial segregation in the armed services.

Silbey said while showing a diverse Navy community on film is important, viewers also need to acknowledge the wider history and ongoing challenges of race in the military.

“The military may be better than a lot of institutions in American life and is actually pretty good now in integrating a range of diverse communities,” he said. “I think it’s a reasonably fair portrayal, but we need to recognize that there’s still a long way to go for the armed services and American society as a whole.”

Playing a naval officer on the big screen

Actor Charles Parnell has played different military characters. Fans will recognize him as Master Chief Petty Officer Russell Jeter on the action-drama TV series “The Last Ship.” In “Top Gun: Maverick,” he has been promoted to Rear Adm. Solomon “Warlock” Bates.

Off-screen, Parnell said many of his friends had coincidentally enlisted in the Navy. He said he took their advice for wearing his uniform in the film and carrying himself as an officer to portray his character with authenticity. He said this experience has also given him a deeper admiration for the Navy.

“I really just learned commitment and responsibility from them in a way that I hadn’t thought about it before,” Parnell said. “And translating that into playing a character on-screen representing a diverse ethnicity just gave me more pride in being a Black man in that position.”

The first Black Navy officer to serve aboard a fighting ship was Samuel Lee Gravely Jr . He was promoted to rear admiral in 1971, at a time when Black members still faced widespread discrimination in the Navy.

Just one year later, The New York Times reported that Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, chief of naval operations, rebuked the Navy’s high command for failing to take action against racial discrimination.

On-screen, Parnell’s character acts as the go-between for Vice Adm. Beau “Cyclone” Simpson (Jon Hamm) and Cruise’s Maverick. In some ways, his character could represent many Black men and women who have served as intermediaries between American society and the Navy on a path to equality.

When asked about the call sign Warlock given to his character in “Top Gun: Maverick,” Parnell said he came up with his own explanation.

“I think that character was in the original ‘Top Gun,’ and he flew with that class. But every time you see a photo, he’s just on the outside of the photo, so you can’t see him,” he said. “My name, Warlock, to me means I managed to disappear out of all of the pictures in the old film. So that’s why they call me Warlock, 'cause I could mysteriously evaporate.”

Follow NBCBLK on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram .

Arturo Conde is an editor and a bilingual freelance journalist. He writes for La Opinión A Coruña and has been published in Fusion, Univision and City Limits.

At the Smithsonian | May 26, 2022

‘Top Gun’ Is Back. But Is the Elite Navy Fighter Pilot School Really Like the Movies?

The Smithsonian’s Chris Browne flew the much-feared F-14, and as a former TOPGUN student, knows well the power of a Navy-trained fighter pilot

Tom Cruise as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell in

Erin Blakemore

Correspondent

Hold on to your aviator sunglasses, Pete "Maverick" Mitchell is back. After a nearly-40-year hiatus, the Top Gun franchise is taking off once more with Top Gun: Maverick , a long-awaited sequel to the hit 1986 film. In theaters now and filled with visual thrills and real-life air sequences, the Tom Cruise vehicle takes viewers back to fighter pilot school.

But what is the U.S. Navy's real training program like? And how accurate was the throwback flick that catapulted both the high-powered military school and the iconic F-14 fighter jet into the public consciousness?

Though it's popularly known as TOPGUN, the Navy's program is actually called the Fighter Weapons School. And as a point of clarification, it hasn't been around since the dawn of fighter planes. Far from it: Though there was a Korean War-era gunnery school , it was brief and had been discontinued by the Vietnam War.

And by 1968, it was painfully clear that U.S. troops were at a disadvantage in the air war over southeast Asia.

Though the proxy war's biggest toll was on the Vietnamese people—it took the lives of an estimated 2 million civilians, 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, and an estimated 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers—the conflict proved deadly to American troops, too. According to the U.S. military, 58,220 American troops were killed in Vietnam, the vast majority before 1970.

North Vietnam's air force was equipped with MiG 17s, a Soviet-designed aircraft that was surprisingly effective. They weren’t built for dogfights in the air—their original intent was to intercept the bombers cruising at altitude and dropping ordinance straight down from on high. But the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong flew them in dogfights with a frustrating—and deadly—level of daring and success.

For the U.S. Navy, which played an essential role in the air war over Vietnam, the situation was unacceptable. When naval officials reviewed their own air-to-air missile performance in 1968, they gave themselves a dismal grade. Just one kill had been achieved for every 10 firing attempts over a three-year period, the Naval Air Systems Command wrote in a document informally known as the Ault Report .

The Navy’s assessment of the preparedness of its own flight crews was brutal. "While the experience in air-to-air missilery is the highest it has ever been, formal missile system training is still largely a 'boot-strap' operation in many areas," the report said . One of its many recommendations was that the Navy establish an advanced training school for fighter pilots.

That's where TOPGUN began, Hill Goodspeed, a historian at the National Naval Aviation Museum, says via email: "The resulting Navy Fighter Weapons School literally changed the face of the air war over North Vietnam as seen in the improved kill ratios against enemy fighters."

Based at Naval Air Station Miramar in San Diego, the program that emerged was rigorous and demanding. Its instructors were subject-matter experts who used real-world intelligence to help trainees grow as fighter pilots. The program involved both lectures and training flights followed by relentless debriefs.

"You'd go back and revisit every turn, every move," says Christopher Browne , the director of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. A former naval flight officer, Browne trained in the program in the early 1980s.

By then, the F-4 Phantoms and F-8 Crusaders of the Vietnam War had been replaced—but the Cold War was still raging. "Our training and efforts really centered around countering the Soviet threat," he says.

The Navy had a not-so-secret weapon: the Grumman F-14 Tomcat —a supersonic fighter jet that ruled the air for more than 35 years. Designed in 1968, the aircraft was specifically developed to counter the Soviets. It featured six long-range AIM-54 Phoenix missiles and others designed for dogfights. Also on board were the most advanced weapons system of its time, and the aircraft had the speed, maneuverability and all-out power needed to dominate the air. "What made the F-14 unique was its adaptability," says Goodspeed. Though it was massive in size, with a 64-foot wingspan and twin engines, it was unexpectedly maneuverable.

It was also fun to fly, says Browne, who learned to pilot the plane in 1981.

"It was essentially a rocket," he says, as he reminisces about what it felt like to feel the raw power of the plane, with a full cargo of weapons, as it got an extra boost from its afterburner for take-off. "Particularly at night, you'd see these plumes of flame going 100 feet after the aircraft. It was not a casual event. It was a thrill ride all the way."

The public was thrilled by the plane, too, as evidenced by its use in multiple movies, not just Top Gun . It made its screen debut in The Final Countdown , a 1980 film starring Kirk Douglas and Martin Sheen that depicted the iconic jet as a time-traveling machine that might just stop the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Students at the Navy Fighter Weapons School often felt like they were running out of time, too. Browne recalls the program's grueling schedule, with lectures, flights, debriefs and lessons that involved studying the enemy's aircraft, too. Browne chuckles when he thinks of the depictions of volleyball games and late-night hangouts in the 1986 film. "It's not that; folks don't have fun along the way. It's training for the real world."

That real-world training took Browne to the skies above the international waters of the Gulf of Sidra, which Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had claimed for his country. Though Browne himself was not there that day, on August 19, 1981, Libyan jets fired on two F-14 Tomcats, which promptly shot them down. Browne later flew one of the planes that had engaged with the Libyan fighters, but says that he never got within more than 50 miles of a Libyan plane.

"When they knew you'd locked on to them, they'd turn and run," he says.

Such was the power of a TOPGUN-trained fighter pilot in the much-feared F-14—and Top Gun the movie only increased the world's interest in, and respect of, naval fighters. But it did sow some misconceptions about the program, most related to its rigor and professionalism.

Fighter pilots aren't quite as brash as Tom Cruise's Maverick. "While fighter pilots are a confident collection of individuals," Goodspeed says, "one former TOPGUN commanding officer stated, 'We are not looking for someone who is arrogant or overconfident. We are looking for aircrew who are humble and approachable; traits that will make them effective teachers in the end.'"

Browne concurs. "What people don't always recognize is that when the Navy deploys a carrier to sea, it's a national asset," he says. "[The fighter pilots] were mindful that we were the difference between success and failure for the carrier."

Get the latest on what's happening At the Smithsonian in your inbox.

Erin Blakemore | | READ MORE

Erin Blakemore is a Boulder, Colorado-based journalist. Her work has appeared in publications like The Washington Post , TIME , mental_floss , Popular Science and JSTOR Daily . Learn more at erinblakemore.com .

Hi, what are you looking for?

19FortyFive

Meet Our Editorial Team
Contact Information for 19FortyFive
Privacy Policy

Smart Bombs: Military, Defense and National Security

L-39: the plane tom cruise used to train for top gun: maverick.

Last month, Tom Cruise appeared on a pre-taped segment for The Late Late Show with James Corden . Cruise was promoting his new film Top Gun: Maverick , which is currently dominating the box office . Consistent with the theme of the film, Cruise took Corden flying, first in a gorgeous North American P-51 Mustang , and then, in the jet that happens to be the primary jet trainer of the Russian armed forces: the Aero L-39 Albatros, a plane the cast of the movie trained on .

Cold War Bird

Created behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia, the L-39 is a high-performance trainer that first flew in 1968. The L-39 was the first trainer aircraft ever equipped with a turbofan engine, which in part led to the model’s popularity and longevity. The Albatros is the most widely used jet trainer in the world – and is still in use with the Russian Air Force, as a stepping stone to the more advanced Sukhoi and MiG fighters.

The L-39 was built as a low-cost, simple aircraft – something Warsaw Pact clients could afford. The trainer was designed with simplicity, affordability, and operational flexibility in mind. To that effect, the onboard systems were simplified, making maintenance relatively easy. And the Albatros was designed to be able to handle a variety of airfields, including rugged or remote strips, again, to maximize operational flexibility. Additionally, the L-39 is regarded as an easy jet to fly – perfect for training – or perfect for an actor who happens to fly on the side.

Trainer With Bite

Despite being designed as a trainer aircraft the L-39 has, at times, been outfitted and used as a light-attack aircraft. Perhaps the most notorious user of the L-39 is the Taliban Air Force. The Taliban somehow managed to procure about five L-39s. With the aid of foreign pilots and technical support, the Taliban used the L-39s in combat during the Afghan civil war against the Northern Alliance.

Iraq is believed to have outfitted its L-39s for attack roles, too. During the second Iraq War, U.S. Navy F/A-18 Hornets attacked parked L-39s. The Syrian Air Force also uses the L-39 for attack purposes. In Syria, the Albatros has routinely been deployed against rebel ground forces. Allegedly, ISIS successfully captured a few L-39s from Syria. Whether ISIS was ever able to get the jets into the air is unclear, although, the terrorist group did release a propaganda video showing an airborne L-39.

In America, both the Patriots Jet Team and the Black Diamond Jet Team operate L-39s. In fact, Cruise was flying one of the Patriots’ L-39s when he took Corden for a spin. Performing barrel rolls and inverted flight, Cruise demonstrated why the L-39 has become so popular on the civilian market. Running a relatively reasonable $200-300,000 USD, the Albatros has become coveted amongst wealthy civilian pilots hoping to experience the L-39’s 470 miles per hour max speed, 4,100 feet per minute rate of climb, and 8g capabilities. As the only second-generation jet trainer readily available for public purchase, the plane is sought by those looking for agility in a personal jet.

The L-39 is not a toy, of course. Aerobatic pilot Mike Mangold was killed on take-off in an L-39. And Atlas Air CEO Michael Chowdry and Wall Street Journal aerospace reporter Jeff Cole were both killed when their plane crashed in Colorado.

Cruise and Corden survived their flight. The video segment currently has 18 million views on YouTube.

Harrison Kass is a Senior Defense Editor at 19FortyFive. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, he joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison has degrees from Lake Forest College, the University of Oregon, and New York University. He lives in Oregon and regularly listens to Dokken.

Harrison Kass is a Senior Defense Editor at 19FortyFive. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, he joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison has degrees from Lake Forest College, the University of Oregon School of Law, and New York University’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. He lives in Oregon and regularly listens to Dokken.

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?"

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly 's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

Glen powell on getting tom cruise’s blessing to do both ‘devotion’ and ‘top gun: maverick:’ “there’s room for two”.

Based on the true story of naval aviator duo Lt. Tom Hudner and Ensign Jesse Brown, 'Devotion' also stars Jonathan Majors and Joe Jonas, and marks Powell's second naval aviation film this year.

By Sydney Odman

Sydney Odman

Assistant to the Editorial Director

Share on Facebook
Share to Flipboard
Send an Email
Show additional share options
Share on LinkedIn
Share on Pinterest
Share on Reddit
Share on Tumblr
Share on Whats App
Print the Article
Post a Comment

Glen Powell and Jonathan Majors attend the Los Angeles Premiere of Sony Pictures' "Devotion" at Regency Village Theatre on November 15, 2022 in Los Angeles, California.

When Glen Powell decided he wanted to play real-life naval officer Tom Hudner nearly six years ago, someone else already held the screen rights to the story.

THR Newsletters

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Demi moore reveals she got shingles and “lost 20 pounds” while filming ‘the substance’, ‘and their children after them’ review: a deindustrialized town in the french provinces makes a vivid setting for a troubled coming-of-age, bts leader’s doc ‘rm: right people, wrong place’ to premiere at busan film festival, summer box office avoids major disaster as domestic revenue falls just 10 percent, daniel craig’s racy turn in luca guadagnino’s ‘queer’ earns raves at venice film festival with 9-minute standing ovation, mia farrow says she “completely understands” if actors choose to still work with woody allen.

'Top Gun: Maverick' Cast & Character Guide: Who's Who in the Legacy Sequel

Your changes have been saved

Email is sent

Email has already been sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

Top Gun: Maverick is one of the biggest blockbusters since the 2020 pandemic. The film sees Pete "Maverick" Mitchell ( Tom Cruise ) return to the esteemed school, Top Gun, to lead a group of young aviators on a near-impossible mission. Seeing Tom Cruise return to Top Gun over 30 years later was a memorable sight. Top Gun: Maverick features familiar faces, new characters, and even appearances of characters who were only mentioned by name. This is a complete character guide for Top Gun: Maverick. Now that the biggest film of the year is available to stream exclusively on Paramount+, we’ve got you covered on who's who.

Related: When Will ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Be Available To Stream?

Tom Cruise as Capt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell

The main character of both Top Gun films is Maverick himself, Pete Mitchell, played by the legendary Tom Cruise. Maverick started as a loose cannon who marched at the beat of his own drum. After the death of his best friend, Goose ( Anthony Edwards ), Maverick learned to grow up and become one of the best aviators in the Navy. When we meet Maverick in the Top Gun sequel, he is still as stubborn as ever, but now he’s often fighting for others. Once he’s tasked with returning to Top Gun, Maverick’s number one priority is making sure the pilots return home from their mission with zero casualties.

Tom Cruise is one of the biggest stars on the planet. You can see him in Edge of Tomorrow , the Mission Impossible series, and American Made ; his upcoming films include Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (Parts 1 and 2), with both Luna Park and Edge of Tomorrow 2 in development.

Val Kilmer as Adm. Tom "Iceman" Kazansky

Top Gun: Maverick went so far as to make Kilmer’s real-life battle with cancer a part of Iceman’s character. The Iceman graduated Top Gun alongside Maverick. The two didn’t see eye-to-eye at first, but they became best friends by the end of the first film. Val Kilmer delivers a terrific performance as Ice, and Top Gun: Maverick allowed the actor to return to the role. Kilmer had to retire from acting due to throat cancer so the film might be Kilmer’s last role, making it all the more touching.

Val Kilmer has a stellar filmography. Some of his most iconic work includes Tombstone , Kiss Kiss Bang Bang , and Heat . He’s also known for starring in Joel Schumacher’s cult classic, Batman Forever .

Miles Teller as Lt. Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw

Miles Teller stars as Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw. The son of Nick ‘Goose’ Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards) and Carole Bradshaw ( Meg Ryan ), Rooster and Maverick’s relationship is one of the film's most significant sources of tension. After the death of Goose in the first film, Maverick feels guilt but also a duty to take care of Carole and Bradley. This leads to friction between Bradley and Maverick since Carole doesn’t want Bradley to be an aviator and get killed like his father. As a favor to Carole, Maverick sets Rooster back three years.

This doesn’t stop Rooster, and he becomes a solid naval aviator. Good enough to be invited back to Top Gun, where Maverick confronts him. The two have a unique relationship, and Rooster is one of the standout characters. Miles Teller is best known for his performances in Whiplash , War Dogs , and Fantastic Four (2015). His most recent film is Spiderhead , and his upcoming projects are The Ark and the Aardvark , The Fence , and The Gorge where he'll star alongside Anya Taylor-Joy .

Jennifer Connelly as Penny Benjamin

Penny is a character that was referenced in the original Top Gun but didn’t make an appearance until Top Gun Maverick . Penny and Maverick have had an on-again-off-again relationship for years, and we see their latest encounter in Top Gun: Maverick . Penny has a daughter named Amelia and owns a bar near Top Gun. Jennifer Connelly brings Penny Benjamin to life. Penny and Mav rekindle their relationship during his time back, and hopefully, it will last. She might be Maverick’s oldest and closest friend, making their bond all the more important to him. Connelly’s notable works include A Beautiful Mind , Requiem For a Dream , and Labyrinth . Connelly will next be seen in Alice Englert 's feature directorial debut Bad Behavior , where she'll star opposite Ben Whishaw .

Lyliana Wray as Amelia Benjamin

Amelia Benjamin is Penny’s daughter. She loves her mother and has a good rapport with Maverick. With the stranger nature of Penny and Maverick’s relationship, Amelia simply wants what’s best for her mother. Lyliana Wray has guest-starred on Black-ish , The Night Shift , and Strange Angel .

Glen Powell as Lt. Jake "Hangman" Seresin

Lt. Jake Seresin is one of the best pilots in Top Gun, but he’s reckless and leaves his fellow aviators hanging, hence the name. Ironically, Hangman isn’t so different from Maverick during his first stint at Top Gun. In a way, Hangman and Rooster mirror Maverick and Iceman. Glen Powell ’s charisma is on full display as Hangman. The actor initially auditioned for the role of Rooster but later took on the part of Hangman after a conversation with Tom Cruise . Glen Powell previously starred in Set It Up , Scream Queens , and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society . He most recently starred in another aviation-themed film, Devotion , where he starred opposite Jonathan Majors . Powell's career has exploded since the release of Top Gun: Maverick landing leading roles in high-profile projects like Richard Linklater 's action-comedy Hitman , the Kat Coiro -directed buddy-comedy Foreign Relations where he'll play opposite Nick Jonas , and the big-budget Prime Video original series Butch & Sundance which also stars Regé-Jean Page and is a reboot of the classic film Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid .

Monica Barbaro as Lt. Natasha "Phoenix" Trace

Phoenix is one of two female pilots invited to Top Gun. She is often at odds with Hangman and a friend to Rooster and the rest of the aviators. Monica Barbaro is best known for her time on Chicago Justice , The Good Cop , and Splitting Up Togethe r. Her next projects will be a voice-role in the Netflix anime series Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas and playing the co-lead in the Arnold Schwarzenegger -led Netflix series Utap .

Related: 'Top Gun: Maverick': Watch Miles Teller Rock Out to "Great Balls of Fire" in New Video

Lewis Pullman as Lt. Robert "Bob" Floyd

Bob becomes Phoenix's second seat and a trusted friend. His name is Bob, and his call sign is Bob, making for pretty funny banter between him and his fellow pilots. Lewis Pullman has previously appeared in Bad Times at the El Royale , Catch-22 , and Them That Follow . His subsequent appearances are in Thelma , Auxiliary Man , Salem’s Lot , and the Brie Larson -led Apple series Lessons in Chemistry .

Jay Ellis as Lt. Reuben "Payback" Fitch

Payback and his partner Fanboy prove to be terrific pilots under Maverick’s teachings. So much so that they are chosen as major players in the upcoming mission. Jay Ellis starred as Payback and was previously seen in Insecure , Mrs. America , and Masters of Sex . His next role is in the forthcoming film, Someone I Used to Know from director Dave Franco .

Danny Ramirez as Lt. Mickey "Fanboy" Garcia

Fanboy is Payback’s flight partner and operates the backseat controls. He serves the same role Bob does for Pheonix or what Goose did for Maverick. Danny Ramirez most recently appeared in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier , Assassination Nation , and No Exit . His upcoming projects are Plus/Minus , Chestnut , and Captain America: New World Order .

Bashir Salahuddin as Wo-1. Bernie "Hondo" Coleman

Bernie is a Warrant Officer Rank 1 and is working on a program that Maverick is test-piloting. When Maverick gets called back to Top Gun, Hondo goes with him and becomes his assistant coach. Bashir Salahuddin is the writer and star of Sherman’s Showcase , where he plays Sherman McDaniels. He has also appeared in Robot Chicken , The Dropout , and has an upcoming project titled Paradise .

Jon Hamm as Adm. Beau "Cyclone" Simpson

Admiral Simpson is tasked with overseeing Maverick’s mission. He doesn’t tolerate Maverick’s shenanigans and doesn’t think he’s the man for the job. Cyclone is very strict and has a no-nonsense attitude, making him the perfect foil for Maverick. Jon Ham is best known as Don Draper from Mad Men. He has also appeared in Tag , Baby Driver , The Town , and he most recently starred in the title role in Confess, Fletch . 2023 looks to be a huge year for Hamm, he'll be reprising his role as Gabriel in Season 2 of Good Omens , will be joining the cast of Season 3 of the Apple original series The Morning Show , will play one of the leads in Season 5 of Fargo , he'll lend his voice to the animated comedy series Grimsburg, and will star in John Slattery 's directorial debut Maggie Moore(s) .

Charles Parnell as Adm. Solomon "Warlock" Bates

Admiral Bates is much more forgiving of Maverick’s past and wants to support him. Warlock works alongside Cyclone and offers a less-strict approach to the situation at hand. Charles Parnell has starred in many projects, including, The Last Ship , The Venture Bros. , and T ransformers: Age of Extinction . He most recently appeared in the FX series Kindred . He is slated to appear in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning - Part One and David Fincher 's action-noir film The Killer .

Ed Harris as Rear Admiral Chaster "Hammer" Cain

Ed Harris has a brief appearance in Top Gun: Maverick , but his presence is felt. We meet Hammer when Maverick is attempting to push his plane to Mach 10 to save the program he’s currently test-piloting for. Hammer arrives to shut down the program in person, and Maverick is flying overhead as he comes. Hammer later informs Maverick that Iceman wants him to report to Top Gun. Ed Harris is known for his roles in The Truman Show , Apollo 13 , Westworld , and Pollock . His upcoming projects include Love Lies Bleeding , Downtown Owl , and Get Away If You Can .

Movie Features

Cookie banner

We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy . Please also read our Privacy Notice and Terms of Use , which became effective December 20, 2019.

By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies.

Filed under:

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.

Share this story

Share this on Facebook
Share this on Twitter
Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: Welcome to Tom Cruise’s Flight School for ‘Top Gun: Maverick’

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 .

The Best Movies at Telluride and the 10 Most Anticipated Fall Films

Who’s to blame for the espn blackout, ‘night shift’ with bill simmons and chris ryan.

Top Gun: Maverick Director Explains The Extreme Scene That The Navy Pilot Flying Tom Cruise Said He'd Never Do Again

You know it's intense when the pilot won't do it again.

Top Gun : Maverick has been the most successful film on the 2022 movie schedule so far, as it brought tons of viewers into the movie theater to witness the spectacle of high-flying planes and death-defying action. While Cruise is known for, and does, most of his stunts, there was one scene in Maverick where a Navy pilot flew the track for him. When they finished filming the pilot said he never wanted to do it again.

Joseph Kosinski explained to Empire that the most extreme scene they shot in the movie was Maverick’s speedy flight through the mountains during training. The pilots have to get through a low and curvy path really fast. To prove it’s possible Maverick ends up flying the course. It was agreed early on that these flights would be practical, and everything we see on screen came from “practical aviation assets flying in front of a lens,” as the aerial coordinator Kevin LaRosa Jr. said. So, for this scene, real-life Navy pilot Frank “Walleye” Weisser flew the course with Cruise in the backseat. He elaborated on the technical difficulty of the sequence saying:

That was the most extreme thing we shot in the film, just in terms of the practicality of what you’re actually seeing on screen. It’s all in-camera, it’s Tom Cruise at 550 knots, going 30 feet above ground through the Toiyabe [Canyon] low-level training grounds. That’s a real Top Gun training thing, but they never fly as low as he does. After they landed, Walleye came up to me and said, ‘Did you get it?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I think we did.’ He said, ‘Good, because I’m never doing that again.’

In other words, they were flying low and fast, and in a way that is never actually done in real Navy training. So, it makes sense the pilot didn’t want to do it again, it sounds like it was a massive and dangerous challenge both physically and mentally. Meanwhile, Kosinski explained that Cruise was having the time of his life, saying:

He would have done it 100 more times! In fact, I smile because when I watch that sequence, he’s wincing through the Gs, but I know under the mask he’s smiling for most of it, because he’s having the time of his life.

Cruise is definitely committed to the art of great action movies. In the Mission Impossible movies, he’s hung onto the outside of an airplane taking off, jumped from roof to roof, and much more, each time upping the ante. So, it makes sense that in the long-awaited Top Gun sequel Cruise had a blast creating these incredible scenes.

While there are moments in the film that defy the laws of physics , a lot of it was practical. Many of the stars have spoken about training for and filming the scenes up in the air. Danny Ramirez explained how insane it was to film in the air, saying they had to wear multiple hats from acting to helping run the cameras in the airplane. Plus, with Cruise leading the cast, the bar was set high for everyone when it came to training and the filming of the jaw-dropping action.

While dangerous, the payoff of these scenes was incredible. They really pulled off an amazing feat with this movie, and it’s wild that the action was so intense even a Navy pilot didn’t want to fly certain sequences again.

You can watch all this action in Top Gun: Maverick which is out on demand. Plus, make sure to stay tuned to the 2023 movie schedule to watch more of Cruise's death-defying action in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning - Part One .

CINEMABLEND NEWSLETTER

Your Daily Blend of Entertainment News

Riley Utley is the Weekend Editor at CinemaBlend. She has written for national publications as well as daily and alt-weekly newspapers in Spokane, Washington, Syracuse, New York and Charleston, South Carolina. She graduated with her master’s degree in arts journalism and communications from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. Since joining the CB team she has covered numerous TV shows and movies -- including her personal favorite shows Ted Lasso and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel . She also has followed and consistently written about everything from Taylor Swift to Fire Country , and she's enjoyed every second of it.

32 Movies That Should Get TV Spin-offs

Kevin Costner Took A Boat To The Horizon 2 Premiere In Venice And It’s Giving More James Bond Than Cowboy

Joe Tessitore Called His First Monday Night Raw, And WWE Fans Are All Saying The Same Thing

site categories

‘inside out 2’ overtakes ‘lion king’ globally, now no. 9 biggest movie ever; ‘despicable me 4’ tops $900m ww; ‘alien: romulus’ & ‘it ends with us’ close in on $300m – international box office, breaking news.

‘Top Gun: Maverick’s’ Hypersonic “Darkstar” Mystery Plane Has A Real-World Relative

By Tom Tapp

Deputy Managing Editor

'Top Gun: Maverick' Set To Take Breath Away With $142M+ Record Memorial Day Opening - Box Office

Canada's International South Asian Film Festival Unveils 2024 Lineup

’Top Gun: Maverick’ From Cannes To Theaters – Deadline’s Complete Coverage

Watch on Deadline

Others guessed it could be something even more exotic: The near-mythical hypersonic SR-72, the Blackbird’s rumored descendant, which is designed to fly at six times the speed of sound.

Lockheed Martin had uncharacteristically announced plans for the plane in 2013. Not much more was heard about the so-called “Son of Blackbird” until Lockheed confirmed engine tests in 2017. Some reports have maintained the SR-72 could be “rolled out for initial flight demonstrations by no later than 2023.” Lockheed, in its original announcement, claimed the game-changer could be operational by 2030. Oh, and it pegged the development cost at $1 billion.

Not much more has ever been officially revealed about the SR-72. That, along with its game-changing speed, has only added to the plane’s mystique.

It was odd, then, that Lockheed CEO James Taiclet posted publicly on LinkedIn this month that the company’s ultra-secret Skunk Works, which handles many of its most boundary-stretching projects including the SR-72, “partnered with Top Gun’s producers to bring cutting-edge, future forward technology to the big screen,” including tech around “hypersonic flight.” He also shared a photo of himself at the film’s premiere.

Lockheed Martin Director of Communications for Europe, the Middle East and Africa John Neilson was even more explicit in a recent tweet writing, “Rumours that Top Gun: Maverick , in cinemas May 27, features a sneaky peek at what might be the @LockheedMartin SR-72, successor to super-impressive SR-71 Blackbird. This still photo from promotional materials seems to support that thinking.”

Rumours that ‘Top Gun: Maverick’, in cinemas May 27, features a sneaky peek at what might be the @LockheedMartin SR-72, successor to super-impressive SR-71 Blackbird. This still photo from promotional materials seems to support that thinking. I can’t wait #avgeek #wingfriday pic.twitter.com/PyAak69qOj — John Neilson (@flyingjok) April 29, 2022

So is it the fabled “Son of Blackbird” that’s featured in Top Gun: Maverick ? The answer is, “sort of.”

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer told military blog Sandboxx News that director “Joe [Kosinski] worked with Skunk Works and Lockheed [Martin] to design the plane that’s in there.”

Kosinski revealed that details of the plane are, indeed, taken “out of real experimental aircraft” from Skunk Works.

“For me, just being kind of an aviation buff, and always loving that world, the idea to give people a peek behind the curtain of secret projects…I worked with Skunk Works, which is the division of Lockheed, that actually makes these type of aircraft because I wanted it to feel as real as possible,” he told Comic Book Movie.com this week. “So, every detail of that is based on reality, the way the aircraft functions, the way it looks, all the switches, and stick are actually taken out of real experimental aircraft.”

And in the spirit of creating as many Top Gun: Maverick’s effects in the real world vs. the digital, “We built a full-scale model, a full-scale mock-up of the Darkstar aircraft that you see Maverick fly in the movie. Yeah, I just wanted to show the audience that the first few minutes definitely feels like a Top Gun movie, but once he gets in that jet, I do also want you to know that we’re telling a whole new story, and that sequence kind of helped set that tone up for the movie.”

A very good shot of the Darkstar is featured in Lady Gaga’s video for her song for the film, “Hold My Hand.” See it below.

“The reason it looks so real is because it was the engineers from Skunk Works who helped us design it,” the director told Sandboxx News. “So those are the same people who are working on real aircraft.”

So, did Cruise — or someone — actually fly a hypersonic plane for the film? The short answer is likely “No.”

Not only would the SR-72 — if a prototype actually exists — be prohibitively expensive to operate even on a blockbuster-level budget, bringing such a plane itself out into the open would have national security implications.

To that point, Bruckheimer made news earlier this month when he told Sandboxx that the Chinese government kept an eye on the plane used in the film.

“The Navy told us that a Chinese satellite turned and headed on a different route to photograph that plane. They thought it was real. That’s how real it looks.”

According to production documents obtained and verified as authentic by Deadline, the scenes involving the Darkstar were scheduled to be shot between November 7 and 9, 2018 out in the Mojave Desert at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, near Ridgecrest.

The Darkstar was filmed both inside and outside a hangar at China Lake, including VFX plate shots and drone shots of the hypersonic clone rolling onto the tarmac. The plane was housed outside over night, but under a “temporary hangar,” likely frustrating interested parties overseas.

If it had been visible, those interested parties might have noticed one crucial difference between what we know of the SR-72 and the plane that Cruise’s Capt. Pete Mitchell flies in the film: Lockheed’s plane is unmanned and has no windows, which would be a problem for a wow-factor aircraft in a film about naval aviators. One other big difference is that the Darkstar, being Tom Cruise’s plane, goes to Mach 10.

For an even closer look at Maverick’s Darkstar, inside and out, here’s a video review of the expansion pack for it which was just released in Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Must Read Stories

First toronto deal sees grindstone & roadside take u.s. rights to starry ‘riff raff’.

It’s Showtime For ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ With $145M Global Opening: Preview

Directv customers will miss ‘bachelorette’ finale amid disney carriage dispute, ‘queer’ review, first footage, red carpet photos & daniel craig comments; more, read more about:, subscribe to deadline.

Get our Breaking News Alerts and Keep your inbox happy.

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.

tom cruise plays capt pete "maverick" mitchell in top gun maverick

In case you've missed the past four decades of his celebrity, the one thing you need to know about Tom Cruise is that he is intense . He's intensely nice . He's intensely dedicated to Covid safety . And he's intense when it comes to doing his own stunts. Like when he famously climbed Dubai's Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol , or when he hung on to the outside of an airplane as it took off not once, not twice, but through eight takes for Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation . As a practical FX purist in a CGI world, Cruise seems dedicated to singlehandedly preserving verisimilitude in action movies.

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.

Entertainment

'The Rings of Power' Is Back With 3 New Episodes

'The Rings of Power' Season 2 Promises to Be Epic

lord of the rings the rings of power season 1 recap

A Full Recap of 'The Rings of Power' Season 1

‘Only Murders in the Building’ Goes Meta in S4

DK Metcalf Says He’s a 'Fat-ass at Heart’

josh rivera in the season's best fall jackets

How Josh Rivera Got Into the Mind of a Killer

best and most anticipated new shows 2024

The 32 Best and Most Anticipated New Shows of 2024

alien romulus offspring human xenomorph hybrid robert bobroczkyi

'Alien: Romulus' Made a Former Athlete Horrifying

‘Industry’ Is Back and Better Than Ever

Michael Keaton Shares His 'Batgirl' Reaction

homicide life on the street peacock streaming

‘Homicide’ Is Streaming for the First Time Ever

How Sci-Fi Fans Can Watch 'Alien: Romulus'

Tom Cruise's Outrageously Lavish Lifestyle Is Hard To Believe

Tom Cruise is one of the world's highest-paid actors . Over the years, Cruise has commanded huge paychecks for his popular blockbusters. For the 2005 film "War of the Worlds," which grossed $603 million worldwide, Cruise was reportedly paid $100 million after he decided to forgo an advanced check. Six years later, Cruise earned a portion of the $700 million gross made off of "Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol," per Forbes . Still, Cruise's biggest payday was right around the corner. After the release of the Joseph Kosinski-directed 2022 film "Top Gun: Maverick," which is Cruise's highest-grossing film at $1.4 billion, he was projected to have earned over $100 million.

Cruise is worth every dime, as a Hollywood executive told Variety in 2022. "I would never bet against Tom Cruise," they said. "Most actors aren't worth what you pay them, but Cruise and maybe Dwayne Johnson justify their salaries." The big bucks Cruise has earned during his decades-long career have afforded him a very lavish life. The actor has had the finest possessions—cars, houses, jets, motorcycles, you name it! Cruise's star power has given him privileges and experiences that the 99% can only dream of. So, in Jerry McGuire's famous words, Nicki Swift will "Show you the money."

He holds a pilot's license and has several private jets

While the fear of heights would freeze most people, Tom Cruise doesn't. In June 2018, Cruise and former television host James Corden went skydiving in a segment promoting "Mission: Impossible – Fallout" on " The Late Late Show with James Corden ." Similarly, Cruise thanked his audience for supporting "Top Gun: Maverick" in December 2022 while aboard a helicopter on the set of "Mission: Impossible-Dead Reckoning."

Cruise has a pilot's license , which he reportedly acquired in 1994. He is also said to own three to five jets, per Forbes . In a promotional clip for "Top Gun: Maverick," Academy Award-winning writer Christopher McQuarrie, Cruise's long-term collaborator, revealed that Cruise's fighter-bomber was used in the blockbuster. "The P51 Mustang as featured in the film is Tom's, and it's a beautiful aircraft," McQuarrie disclosed.

Cruise's "Top Gun: Maverick" co-stars have shared their experiences with him in the pilot's seat. For actor Jennifer Connelly, flying alongside Cruise as he performed rolling stunts on the P51 Mustang was a ride of a lifetime. "It was an incredible experience," Connelly said. "Certainly like nothing I've ever done before." Cruise's other co-star, Glen Powell, told CBS Mornings that working with Cruise included such a thorough flight program, which inspired him to go ahead and get his own pilot's license.

Tom Cruise's real estate portfolio is worth hundreds of millions

Tom Cruise has bought and sold exquisite homes over the years, and in November 2016, The Tampa Bay Times reported Cruise acquired the uppermost floors of a Clearwater, Florida, building. Per the publication, Cruise was looking to merge three $3 million units into one luxurious penthouse. Seven years later, it was reported that Cruise owned not one but three other condos within the same building, all worth $1,475,000. Cruise's purchase raised eyebrows for two reasons—the project's developer was a member of the Church of Scientology, and its location wasn't far from the church's headquarters.

Just as Cruise invests millions in buying and tailoring properties to suit his needs, his asking price when selling them is audacious. In 2016, Cruise made a $7.5 million profit when he sold the 10,000-square-foot Beverly Hills home he once shared with ex Katie Holmes for $40 million. Two years later, the actor put his Telluride, Colorado, ranch on the market for $59 million. In March 2021, it was back on sale for $39.5 million, and by May of that year, Cruise had found a buyer.

The actor loves fast and expensive cars

As far as the need for speed goes—pun intended—Tom Cruise is not limited to private jets. In April 2007, Cruise and Katie Holmes were pictured arriving at Mastro's Steakhouse in a 1958 Chevrolet Corvette (C1). Different variations of the sports car model, whose production ceased in 1962, recorded speeds of up to 142 mph. At the time of writing, the car is still valuable, and its average market price is $120,196.

In May 2006, Cruise and Holmes arrived at the "Mission: Impossible III" premiere in a Bugatti Veyron (2005). Cruise had a hard time opening the door of the super sports car, which led to a rumor that he'd been banned from ever owning a Bugatti. The luxury car boasts a speed of 252 mph and retails at an average price of $1.5 million as of August 2024.

Still on Cruise's love for top-speed automobiles, the actor used a Ford Saleen Mustang to move around New York during the 2006 premiere of "Mission: Impossible III." Cruise had the car flown overnight from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey, for a whopping $13,000. According to John Ficarra, a film car company owner who facilitated that transportation, Cruise owned more than one Ford Saleen Mustang at the time.

Tom Cruise had a money-saving, quick divorce from Katie Holmes

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes pose at event

In June 2012, Katie Holmes filed for divorce from Tom Cruise. The "Edge of Tomorrow" actor was apparently caught off-guard by the unexpected move. Luckily, the pair had a prenuptial agreement, which reportedly guaranteed Holmes payment depending on the number of years they were married. One of the causes of the divorce, as Cruise revealed in a deposition, was his affiliation with the Church of Scientology (via ABC ). Holmes cut ties with the church at the onset of divorce proceedings, while Cruise is reportedly still a member as of 2024.

Holmes and Cruise were able to reach an agreement in a record 11 days. According to lawyer Marilyn Chinitz, a partner at the firm that represented Cruise, the couple settled swiftly for two reasons. First, they both had lawyers who had their best interests at heart. Second, a much longer process would have cost them more money. "It's incredibly costly to litigate," Chinitz told Bloomberg Law . "And the cost factors are enormous. You're better off taking those monies and putting it into your child's college account and saving it."

His children attended high-cost private schools

Tom Cruise shares adopted children, Connor and Isabella Cruise , with "The Hours" actor Nicole Kidman. Connor and Isabella reportedly went to Delphian School in Portland, Oregon, a private day and boarding school that doesn't come cheap. As of 2024, students at Delphian School pay $27,652 to $78,596 annually in tuition fees.

During Katie Holmes and Cruise's split, the former lovebirds' daughter Suri Cruise, whom the pair welcomed in April 2006, was entitled to a figure in the neighborhood of $400,000 every year in child support until her 18th birthday. She, too, attended some costly schools. Suri was reportedly at the $40,000-per-year Avenues: The World School in New York. Per Daily Mail , her curriculum included Mandarin lessons.

In June 2024, Suri graduated from LaGuardia High School, a public school with many famous alumni, including Jennifer Aniston, Timothée Chalamet, and "Suits" star Gina Torres. Suri then enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University. According to the school's 2024/2025 fee structure, students pay either $86,812 or $73,000 for tuition and other expenses, depending on whether they are boarding.

Was Tom Cruise aboard a $570,000-per-week superyacht?

In July 2021, the "Triple Seven," a luxury superyacht, arrived in Penzance, an ancient town in southwestern England. Tom Cruise was rumored to have been aboard the vessel early in the morning. Observers reportedly noticed a supposed silhouette of Cruise as the sun began to rise, but there was no verification that it was the "American Made" actor. Cruise had earlier been seen leaving "Triple Seven" when it stopped in Mevagissey, a fishing village in Cornwall that's only a 52-minute drive away.

The "Triple Seven" is the epitome of luxury at sea. It has an 18-member crew and can host up to 10 guests. To rent it, customers must pay at least $570,000 per week. The superyacht features luxurious amenities such as a lounge, a sun deck jacuzzi, and a beach club. Fitness enthusiasts have a reason to smile when aboard it since the 223-foot superyacht includes a gym.

As if renting "Triple Seven" is not expensive enough, buying it costs an arm and a leg. As of August 2024, the listed market price is $42.2 million. Cruise may not have a problem affording it since his net worth as of March 2024 was $600 million, per Celebrity Net Worth .

He's worn some high-end timepieces in the past

Tom Cruise claps at the 2024 Wimbledon Championships

Tom Cruise is often seen wearing super expensive watch brands at events. In July 2018, Cruise was promoting "Mission: Impossible – Fallout" at Lotte Cinema World Tower in Seoul, South Korea [ 0:06 ]. At the press conference, the actor was sporting an all-black outfit which he paired with a stainless steel Calibre de Cartier Chronograph. The elegant timepiece had a price tag of $10,900 at the time, but the watch model has since been discontinued.

In another sighting, Cruise was pictured carrying an umbrella as he walked into Jimmy Kimmel's studio in February 2023. Despite the blurring effects of the rain, the Rolex GMT-Master II on his left wrist was hard to miss. Per GQ , Cruise's GMT-Master featured white gold in place of normal steel. The GMT-Master II in Oystersteel costs $30,900 at the time of writing, which means Cruise could have paid a lot more for his watch.

Cruise clearly has a strong liking for the Rolex brand. During the 2024 Wimbledon Women's Singles final, Cruise was in attendance alongside celebrities like "Euphoria" star Zendaya and Russian tennis legend Maria Sharapova. Once again, he was dressed in all-black and wore a Rolex Day-Date, which retails at $40,100 as of August 2024.

Tom Cruise has an exotic taste in motorcycles

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes arrive in a Honda Rune motorcycle

Tom Cruise has an exquisite preference in motorcycles, although it's not quite clear which ones he specifically owns. At the June 2005 premiere of "War of the Worlds," Cruise and Katie Holmes arrived in a 2004 Honda Rune motorcycle. The following year, Cruise went to the premiere of "Mission: Impossible III" in New York while riding a Confederate Hellcat F-113 Combat. The 2005 Hellcat is priced at $45,000 as at August 2024. In September 2018, Cruise was spotted leaving on a Ducati SuperSport after dining at a Japanese restaurant.

Cruise, as it turns out, is a skilled motorcyclist. In an interview with Moto Tribe , Justin Kell, who's helped create most motorcycle stunts in Hollywood, said of the actor, "Tom Cruise can ride a motorcycle really well. He's a really good rider." Cruise's most daring stunt was performed in the 2023 film " Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One ." Cruise rode a motorcycle through a ramp and off a Norwegian cliff. He had a sharp descent, then proceeded to deploy a parachute that helped him land safely on the ground. During a behind-the-scenes shoot , Cruise said of the Honda CRF450R bike he used, "This is next part training right here — motocross."

He plays golf in his free time

Tom Cruise poses with the Killarney Country Club team

Tom Cruise can obviously afford to pay to play on any golf course in the world, but it's not always as expensive as it seems. In July 2020, Cruise made a stop for lunch at Richmond Park Golf Club in the southwest of London. The club is quite friendly to the public, seeing as its 2024 joining and membership fees only amount to $157. However, it has an additional "pay as you play" revenue model.

In May of the following year, Cruise took time away from filming "Mission: Impossible" in North Yorkshire, England, to play golf at St. Andrews, Scotland. St Andrews is one of the world's oldest golf clubs backed by luxurious brands like Rolex. As of August 2024, an individual weekly package for playing golf at the facility costs $230.

Cruise traveled to Johannesburg, South Africa, in December 2022 and stopped at Killarney Country Club . The facility is also quite affordable — it has a $302 annual student membership fee as of August 2024. So, what's different about Cruise if golf clubs are that accessible? Well, in true Hollywood superstar fashion, Cruise had the convenience of visiting these golf clubs in a helicopter. That's a luxury that's not available to many regular folks.

Tom Cruise sends former co-star Dakota Fanning the same birthday gift every year

Tom Cruise and young Dakota Fanning all smiles

Actor Dakota Fanning starred alongside Tom Cruise in the Steven Spielberg-directed thriller "War of the Worlds" in 2005. Fanning turned 11 during filming, and Cruise was kind enough to buy her a gift. "He [Cruise] gave me my first cell phone for that birthday. It was a Motorola Razr," the "Please Stand By" actor recalled on " The Kelly Clarkson Show ." "I wanted a Razr so bad ... and I must have been talking about it a lot because that's what he got me."

Every year since, Fanning has received the same gift from Cruise — a pair of shoes. That, too, was a calculated and thoughtful gift on Cruise's part, as Fanning told Clarkson. "I ... like loved shoes when I was little and like, I started to fit into really small adult shoes when I was on the "War of the Worlds" press tour, so I was very excited about them. And so, from that birthday on, he always sends me shoes." Fanning assumed the birthday tradition would die on her 18th birthday, as she shared on " Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen ," but the shoes kept coming well into her 30th birthday.

The Tom Cruise Cake is a holiday hit

When the holidays come around, Tom Cruise has a foolproof way of keeping a smile on everyone's face — coconut cake. Cruise's flavored coconut bundt cakes come with a custom note from the actor and distributed to celebrities and random California residents. They are made at Doan's Bakery, a small, family-run shop in downtown Los Angeles.

Several celebrity recipients of the "Tom Cruise Cake" have expressed how good it tastes. In an interview with Virgin Radio UK , "Forrest Gump" star Tom Hanks said, "It is a vanilla coconut bundt cake ... It is the most delicious cake you'll ever have on your platter." In a conversation with " The Jennifer Hudson Show ," Cruise's " Top Gun: Maverick" co-star Glen Powell revealed that the cake became a favorite amongst his friends, and he had to create a party in its honor. "My friends that have tried it, they love it so much that ... they hit me up, like, right around December 1st, like 'Hey! Has it arrived yet?'" Powell shared. "So, now I have like a party at my house where I'll have the 'Cruise Cake.' It's my 'Cruise Cake' party and I'll invite people over to try a bite or two of the 'Cruise Cake.'"

Word around town is that Cruise chose the cake because he loved it when he first tasted it. However, the actor surprisingly doesn't indulge because of his active lifestyle, as he disclosed on " The Late Late Show with James Corden ." "I love sugar but I can't eat it," Cruise said.

Tom Cruise is generous to strangers

Tom Cruise is not only generous to friends, family, fans and his co-stars. On separate occasions, Cruise has shown kindness to complete strangers. In March 1996, Cruise coincidentally crossed paths with a young woman named Heloisa Vinhas, who was knocked down by a runaway driver. Per Tampa Bay Times , the actor not only helped her get medical attention, but paid her hospital bill. Eight years later, Cruise made a $5,000 contribution to a Dairy Queen donation box to help foot the medical bill for 11-year-old Ashley Flint. Flint, a Virginia resident, had sustained serious injuries in a go-kart accident.

Through the years, Cruise has worked with numerous charities, including UNICEF, Mentor L.A., and Raising Malawi. Although his philanthropic work is appreciated, not all of his contributions have been received well publicly. Cruise's connection to the Church of Scientology is often met with harsh criticism. In 2004, the actor reportedly gave the controversial church $3.2 million in donations, per Daily Mail .

He performed a stunt at the 2024 Olympic Games closing ceremony

Tom Cruise does a stunt at the 2024 Olympic Games

When the 2024 Olympic Games ended, the United States topped the medal table with 40 gold medals, 44 silver medals, and 42 bronze medals. The Republic of China came in second, and Japan took third place. The hosts, France, managed fifth place with 64 medals.

At the closing ceremony, Tom Cruise handed over the Games to its next destination: Hollywood. Cruise dropped from the Stade de France rooftop as musician H.E.R performed [ 0:34 ]. He walked through a crowd that cheered him on, then received the Olympic flag from Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass and seven-time gold medalist Simone Biles. The actor mounted the flag on a motorcycle. He proceeded to ride through the streets of Paris, all while a fully illuminated Eiffel Tower provided a majestic background. Cruise got into an airplane, skydived, and planted the Olympic flag at the Hollywood sign.

During a behind-the-scenes feature, Cruise couldn't help but express his delight. "[I'm] very excited that it's going to be in L.A.," he told L.A. 28 . "I'm very excited to be part of it — to bring it from Paris to Los Angeles. I admire these athletes so much. They take it to that level."

Search Please fill out this field.
Manage Your Subscription
Give a Gift Subscription
Newsletters
Sweepstakes

Entertainment
Action Movies

See the Hot New Costars Taking to the Sky with Tom Cruise in 'Top Gun: Maverick'

Six actors received training from Tom Cruise for Top Gun: Maverick — among them were Miles Teller and Glen Powell

Tom Cruise ‘s new fighter pilots are learning a thing or two from the iconic movie star.

In six new images released from Paramount Studios, Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is taking on new pilots in the 1986 film’s highly anticipated sequel, Top Gun: Maverick.

Joining Cruise, 57, are Miles Teller , Glen Powell , Monica Barbaro , Jay Ellis , Lewis Pullman and Danny Ramirez .

The film takes place more than 30 years after Top Gun hit theaters and follows Maverick as he gives additional training to graduate fighter pilots for the Navy.

Teller stars as Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, the son of Goose, who died in the 1986 film and was played by Anthony Edwards.

Powell plays Hangman, Ellis portrays Playback and Pullman stars as BOB, while Ramirez is Fanboy and Barbaro, the only female in the group, portrays Phoenix.

The film’s director, Joseph Kosinski, spoke to Entertainment Weekly in his first interview about the film, saying all the actors involved had to train to fly F-18 Super Hornets and experience 1,600 pounds of force.

“The experience is thrilling, but very physically grueling,” Kosinski said. “The maneuvers that we were putting them through to tell this story are not something that you can just jump in and do. They all had to go through months of aerial training.”

Kosinski continued, “We put them through a training course that Tom actually designed himself. He’s a licensed aerobatic pilot, and he was thrown into the deep end when he did the first Top Gun without any training. So he knew that they would need to kind of work up to that level.”

All the actors flying were tasked with the full responsibility of what it meant to be in control of a fighter jet.

“There’s no crew up there. I’m not up there with him, there’s no cinematographer, no hair and makeup,” Kosinski said. “They are responsible for every aspect of the filmmaking process when they’re up in those airplanes.”

As for what fans can expect from the sequel, Kosinski said Val Kilmer’s Iceman will be returning but he couldn’t spill any details.

“The rivalry and relationship between Iceman and Maverick is one of those things that makes that first film so iconic,” Kosinski told EW . “It’s a relationship that is important to the Top Gun franchise and as a fan, I would want to see how it’s evolved.”

Also, fans will get to see Teller’s Rooster and the aftermath of Goose’s death on both him and Maverick.

“The relationship between Maverick and Rooster really forms the emotional core and spine of the film,” Kosinski said.“It was really one of the key reasons Tom felt like that now this is the time to go back and do this.”

Top Gun: Maverick is in theaters on June 26.

The Real Military Program That Inspired <i>Top Gun</i> Just Turned 50. Here’s How Being a Navy Pilot Has Changed Since Then

The Real Military Program That Inspired Top Gun Just Turned 50. Here’s How Being a Navy Pilot Has Changed Since Then

T he Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center at Naval Air Station Fallon in Nevada is most famous for its connection with the 1986 movie Top Gun. Its TOPGUN program — which turned 50 on March 3 — went by that nickname long before the movie, which was made with the cooperation of the military , introduced the terminology to the wider public. The movie was a hit, prompting a surge in real-life recruiting as well as interest in a sequel (which was supposed to come out this summer, but is now not expected to hit theaters until the summer of 2020 ). And the school is still teaching American pilots to fly.

Originally called the United States Navy Fighter Weapons School, it was founded after a 1968 study determined that U.S. pilots needed better training, with the intention of changing the way those pilots flew and fought. And that it did, says Capt. Dan Pedersen, who is considered the “godfather” of TOPGUN for helping start the program. With his new memoir TOPGUN: An American Story out Tuesday, he spoke to TIME about the history of the program and how true to life the movie really is.

TIME: How were you involved in the founding of TOPGUN?

Pedersen: We were losing a lot of great talent in Vietnam. When I was on the USS Enterprise in 1967, we lost 11 guys in 17 days. We were getting two enemies, North Vietnamese, for every one of us that was shot down out there. Captain Frank Ault wrote a report and one of his recommendations was that they started a graduate-level school to better train pilots. So I was sent to Naval Air Station Miramar, and I recruited eight other guys to help start the program. I was 32, and the youngest of the nine was 22.

What’s an example of the kind of key changes in tactic that were taught there?

MiGs [Soviet planes] had a better turn rate, so it could get around you and shoot you down. Phantoms had great power, so we could out-fly the MiGs in terms of speed. So we decided to go straight up, go above them and fly down to a perfect position behind the MiG, and go for a tail shot. Then with tactics like that, we were getting 24 of the enemies for every one of us.

What did you like about the movie Top Gun ?

The movie was 55% percent positive. The flying was superb, probably someone of the best camera photography of tactical airplanes that’s ever been done. Kelly McGillis’ character was based on a real advisor to the admiral at Miramar. She was very well thought of and went on to be the acting Deputy Defense Secretary . The academies had more people applying [after the movie came out]. If it keeps the Navy recruiters busy, I’m all for it.

Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter

What didn’t you like about it?

It created a false public impression of what it really took and the price we paid. My guys were far more serious and cerebral than the guys in the film because there was a war going on. We actually worked seven days a week probably, starting at 4:30 in the morning. On Fridays, I let the youngest guys who lived in La Jolla out early, so they could party — that’s what young guys are supposed to do — but most of us never got home during the week. I spent many nights sleeping in my car.

[The movie] created some animosity within the Navy by making it seem like it was a golden thing to be a fighter pilot. What about the guys who weren’t flying fighters? I also didn’t care for the open competition between the guys in the movie. It’s the best brotherhood you’d ever want to be a part of. There was no beach volleyball, but we played racquetball to get rid of the stress four or five times a week.

How has being Navy pilot today changed since you started TOPGUN 50 years ago?

A lot of pilots are getting out and going to work for an airline , where they can make make two or three times the money and go home to see their family. The people at TOPGUN ought to be given more of an advisory role in the acquisition of new hardware and weapons. You don’t need politicians in Washington or civil-service people [deciding] what you’re going to fight the war with. They get too caught up with new weapons and systems that are so expensive. Then the pilots are overwhelmed with things they don’t need in the airplane. All it takes is a single bullet in the right place to do you in.

More Must-Reads from TIME

How Nayib Bukele’s ‘Iron Fist’ Has Transformed El Salvador
What Makes a Friendship Last Forever?
How to Read Political Polls Like a Pro
Long COVID Looks Different in Kids
What a $129 Frying Pan Says About America’s Eating Habits
How ‘Friendshoring’ Made Southeast Asia Pivotal to the AI Revolution
Column: Your Cynicism Isn’t Helping Anybody
The 32 Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2024

Write to Olivia B. Waxman at [email protected]

TOP GUN: MAVERICK Gets Remade with a Cat in the Pilot’s Seat

It’s not enough to call Top Gun: Maverick a bonafide hit. The long-awaited sequel is a worldwide phenomenon, bringing in nearly $1.5 billion in ticket sales around the globe. And it didn’t just take off with audiences, either. Critics also loved the high-octane return of Tom Cruise’s Pete Mitchell . That’s why it’s hard to imagine it possibly being any better than it already is. But that was before we saw the Top Gun franchise reimagined with a cat in a starring role. And while America might not be safer with a feline flyer, it sure is a lot cuter. And also a lot funnier.

The YouTube channel OwlKitty felt the need…the need for speed. It also felt the need to make yet another perfect movie/cat mashup video . Their latest cinematic crossover places an adorable black cat alongside Tom Cruise’s iconic Navy pilot. Rather than serving with Goose (RIP Goose!) during his early flying days, Maverick had a little furry friend with him. And presumably because cat’s ( and Tom Cruise ) have nine lives, it was still around for the 2022 sequel. (Again, we miss you Goose!)

From the sands of a volleyball court to riding on a motorcycle, this kitty lives life fast. He’s also a pretty good pilot himself, taking some of the country’s best young fliers to school. Though, in fairness to them, we imagine it would be hard to focus when flying alongside a cat at Mach 3.

A black cat wearing a pilot helmet and flying a fighterjet in a Top Gun mashup

Would Top Gun: Maverick really have been even better with a cat in a prominent role? Probably not, but we’re not ruling it out either. We are positive, though, that this combo made for perfect internet silliness. Because while we always have the need for speed, we also always have the need for funny cat videos. And anyone who gives those to us can always be our wingman.

The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time

By Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone

The thing that has always distinguished TV storytelling from its big-screen counterpart is the existence of individual episodes. We consume our series — even the ones that we binge — in distinct chunks, and the medium is at its best when it embraces this. The joy of watching an ongoing series comes as much from the separate steps on the journey as it does from the destination, if not more. Few pop-culture experiences are more satisfying than when your favorite show knocks it out of the park with a single chapter, whether it’s an episode that wildly deviates from the series’ norm, or just an incredibly well-executed version of the familiar formula.

Still, that episodic nature makes TV fundamentally inconsistent. The greatest drama ever made , The Sopranos , was occasionally capable of duds like the Columbus Day episode. And even mediocre shows can churn out a single episode at the level of much stronger overall series. For this Rolling Stone list of the 100 greatest episodes of all time, we looked at both the peak installments of classic series, as well as examples of lesser shows that managed to briefly punch way above their weight class. We have episodes from the Fifties all the way through this year. We stuck with narrative dramas and comedies only — so, no news, no reality TV, no sketch comedy, talk shows, etc. In a few cases, there are two-part episodes, but we mostly picked solo entries. And while it’s largely made up of American shows (as watched by our American staff), a handful of international entries made the final cut.

Fargo, “Bisquik” (Season 5, Episode 10)

"FARGO" -- "Bisquik" -- Year 5, Episode 10 (Airs Jan 16) Pictured: Juno Temple as Dorothy “Dot” Lyon. CR: FX

Our list of classic episodes starts with its most recent entry, from a January 2024 installment of the great FX anthology drama inspired by the work of the Coen brothers. Fargo Season Five dealt with the growing sense of polarization in America, and the debts — both literal and figurative — that everyone feels they’re owed from everyone else. It all culminates in a long, surprising, utterly gorgeous scene where our firecracker of a heroine, Dot Lyon (Juno Temple) finds herself face-to-face with immortal sin-eater Ole Munch (Sam Spruell), who has come for a rematch of their clash in the season premiere. With her husband and daughter in the house with her, Dot declines to fight this terrifying man, and instead explains, patiently and with palpable kindness, that perhaps Ole Munch might prefer a world focused less on resentment and more on love. — Alan Sepinwall

The Cosby Show, “Theo’s Holiday” (Season 2, Episode 22)

THE COSBY SHOW -- "Theo's Holiday" Episode 22 -- Air Date 04/03/1986 -- Pictured: (l-r) Keshia Knight Pulliam as Rudy Huxtable (Photo by NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)

There’s a temptation with these lists to immediately disqualify anything associated with the true monsters like Bill Cosby. But his crimes shouldn’t erase from the history books the wonderful work of everyone else involved in “Theo’s Holiday,” in which the Huxtables get together for an elaborate role-playing exercise to teach Theo (Malcolm Jamal-Warner) a lesson about the economics of life in, as he puts it, “the real world.” All the actors throws themselves into these larger-than-life characters, like Clair (Phylicia Rashad) as a cheery restaurant owner as well as a fast-talking furniture saleslady, or little Rudy (Keshia Knight Pulliam) as a powerful businesswoman. The idea of the whole clan teaming up to both mock Theo and help him out is so intoxicating that even his best friend Cockroach (Carl Anthony Payne II) admits, “I wish they did this kind of stuff at my house!” — A.S.

South Park, “Scott Tenorman Must Die” (Season 5, Episode 4)

A show that features an anthropomorphized turd in a Christmas hat and at least one projectile vomit scene per episode, South Park has never been known as highbrow. Yet there are elements of “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” a Season Five episode focused on Cartman’s elaborate revenge plot against a high schooler who scammed him by selling his pubes, that are nothing less than virtuosic. There’s the plot itself, a retelling of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, which culminates (spoiler alert, I guess) with the protagonist forcing a woman to unwittingly eat her own children. There’s the exquisite cameo appearance by Radiohead, the culmination of Scott Tenorman’s debasement. And there’s Cartman’s classic taunt, “Charade you are, Scott Tenorman,” a reference to an obscure track of Pink Floyd’s Animals. Co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have often referred to “Scott Tenorman Must Die” as the apex of Cartman’s villainy, marking the character’s transition from obnoxious troll to next-level sociopath. But really, the episode marks another transition entirely: that of Stone and Parker from poop joke purveyors to dark-comedy masters. — Ej Dickson

You’re the Worst, “There Is Not Currently a Problem” (Season 2, Episode 7)

YOU'RE THE WORST -- "There Is Not Currently A Problem" -- Episode 207 (Airs Wednesday, October 21, 10:30 pm e/p Pictured: (l-r) Chris Geere as Jimmy, Aya Cash as Gretchen. CR: Byron Cohen/FX

Here’s an odd but welcome trend: FX not only has an excellent track record with extremely niche half-hour comedies (some of which you’ll find higher on this list), but many of them manage to weave thoughtful, even dramatic, material about mental health issues into their usual humor. The hip-hop comedy Dave did it with a terrific episode where we learn that Lil Dicky’s hype man GaTa struggles with bipolar disorder. The final Reservation Dogs season revolved around a character who’d spent much of his life institutionalized. And You’re the Worst — a romantic comedy about two selfish, immature people who would be horrified to learn they were the main characters in a romantic comedy — found a new level with an episode revealing that Gretchen (Aya Cash) suffers from clinical depression. Much of “There Is Not Currently a Problem” is fairly comedic: a bottle episode where the gang is stuck together with Gretchen and Jimmy (Chris Geere) because a local marathon has caused a traffic jam in their neighborhood. But this forced closeness comes while Gretchen is trapped in her latest depressive episode, with no choice but to finally reveal her condition to Jimmy — and to admit that she’s less worried that he’ll reject her for it than that he’ll become the latest man convinced he can “fix” her. Cash conveys every bit of the pain and fear Gretchen is experiencing, in a way that enriches the laughter rather than undercutting it. — A.S.

In Treatment, “Alex: Week Eight” (Season 1, Episode 37)

Most episodes of this drama were presented as real-time therapy sessions between Dr. Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) and one of his patients, or Paul visiting his own shrink. Occasionally, though, outsiders found their way into Paul’s office, like Alex Prince, Sr. (Glynn Turman), the father of one of Paul’s patients, seeking answers as to why his son committed suicide. Alex Jr. had spent most of his sessions to that point painting his dad as such a monster, it should have been impossible for any actor to both live up to those stories and not seem like a cartoon. Turman, in one of the best dramatic performances you will ever see on television, somehow did it, channeling both the bogeyman and the grieving father, in a riveting two-hander with Byrne. — A.S.

Bob’s Burgers, “Tina-rannosaurus Wrecks” (Season 3, Episode 7)

BOB'S BURGERS: Bob gives Tina her first try behind the wheel in the all-new "Tina-rannasaurus Wrecks" episode of BOB'S BURGERS airing Sunday, Dec. 2 (8:30-9:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX. BOB'S BURGERS ô and © 2012 TCFFC ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Bob’s Burgers loves puns, but “Tina-rannosaurus Wrecks” is a groaner of a title even for them. No matter, because the episode so expertly combines many of the series’ hallmarks into one tight, funny, awkward package. Once again, a well-meaning parenting gesture by Bob (H. Jon Benjamin) goes awry, when he lets Tina (Dan Mintz) drive the family station wagon in a nearly empty parking lot, and she somehow crashes into the only other car there. Once again, the Belchers find themselves on the verge of financial calamity, when the other car turns out to belong to Bob’s ruthless rival, Jimmy Pesto (Jay Johnston). Once again, the family gets mixed up in the plans of a lunatic, when insurance adjuster Chase (Bob Odenkirk) forces them to aid him in an insurance fraud scheme in order to get out of the mess with Jimmy. And, once again, Bob’s lovable but terrible children somehow prove surprisingly useful, when Tina uses her brother’s Casio keyboard to get incriminating evidence that frees them from Chase’s clutches. All’s well that ends… not necessarily well, but at least not substantially worse than usual. — A.S.

Enlightened, “Consider Helen” (Season 1, Episode 9)

Today, it seems almost obligatory for cable and streaming shows to devote one or two episodes a season to presenting the POV of a minor character. When future White Lotus creator Mike White did it with his first HBO series, Enlightened , it was still relatively rare. And in this case, the shifts in perspective came as a welcome, even necessary, relief from all the time spent in the head of the show’s fascinating but maddening main character, Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern), a toxically narcissistic former executive trying to rebuild her life after a nervous breakdown. With “Consider Helen,” White moved the focus to Amy’s mother Helen (played by Dern’s real-life mom, the great Diane Ladd), to present a day in her life, to show what a chore it is to have to deal with such a pathologically needy child, and to make clear that Enlightened itself understood exactly how its audience would respond to Amy. — A.S.

Maude, “Maude’s Dilemma” (Season 1, Episodes 9 & 10)

MAUDE, Bea Arthur, Adrienne Barbeau, 1972-1978

This two-parter, in which Maude (Bea Arthur) is shocked to discover that she’s pregnant again at 47, and has to decide whether she wants to get an abortion, was so ahead of its time, even the original Supreme Court verdict on Roe v. Wade was two months away. Well after Maude decided to end her pregnancy, the rest of television shied away from the subject, often having pregnant characters suffer conveniently-timed miscarriages before they could make up their minds and potentially alienate viewers and sponsors. But “Maude’s Dilemma,” with a teleplay by future Golden Girls creator Susan Harris, ran toward the thorny subject, and handled it with both humor and grace. — A.S.

Scrubs, “My Screw Up” (Season 3, Episode 14)

SCRUBS -- "My Screw Up" Episode 14 -- Pictured: (l-r) John C. McGinley as Dr. Perry Cox, Brendan Fraser as Ben Sullivan -- (Photo by: Carin Baer/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)

There are plenty of shows we call dramedies, even though they’re really just half-hour dramas, as well as lots of alleged comedies that aren’t particularly interested in making the audience laugh. The hospital show Scrubs , though, was remarkably comfortable at balancing silliness and sadness throughout its run, especially in “My Screw Up.” Brendan Fraser reprises his role as Ben, wisecracking brother-in-law to John C. McGinley’s bitterly sarcastic Dr. Cox. Ben’s leukemia appeared to be in remission when last we saw him, so there’s room for him to relentlessly tease J.D. (Zach Braff) about having made out with both of Ben’s sisters, as well as a lighthearted subplot where Turk (Donald Faison) tries to convince Carla (Judy Reyes) to take his name when they’re married, in exchange for having a mole she hates removed. But things also get plausibly serious, even before we get to the Sixth Sense -style twist: Ben was the patient whose death earlier in the episode caused a rift between Cox and J.D., and Cox has been in denial about it ever since. Even the revelation that Cox has been imagining conversations with his dead friend is reflective of the show’s juggling of comedy and drama — it’s the dark mirror of how Scrubs generates so much humor from taking us inside the highly-distractible mind of J.D. — A.S.

Watchmen, “This Extraordinary Being” (Episode 6)

Even for a series as sophisticated and layered as Watchmen , this episode is an acrobatic feat. In the most dramatic departure from the show’s source material, the 1980s comic of the same name, “This Extraordinary Being” tells the origin story of one of this world’s seminal vigilante superheroes, Hooded Justice (a man lionized in a modern-day TV show-within-the-show that kicks off the episode). Told almost entirely in black and white, it sees our current-day heroine Angela Abar (Regina King) — herself a vigilante who goes by Sister Night, when she’s not working her day job as a cop — sucked into the memories of her grandfather, Will Reeves, after swallowing a bottle of his “nostalgia pills.” Transported to 1930s New York, we watch Will (played as a young man by Jovan Adepo), and sometimes Angela-as-Will, join the NYPD, where he encounters racism so virulent, his fellow cops stage a near-lynching, covering him with a hood and briefly hanging him from a tree as a warning to stand down. The message he takes away, though, is that there is plenty of evil to fight in the world, even in his own precinct. He just has to do it undercover — appropriating for his costume the very hood and noose that had been used to terrorize him. With balletic camerawork, a period soundtrack of big band standards, and visceral performances from King and Adepo, the episode is a sweeping achievement that inverts a fundamental truth of the series’ world — this revered hero that everyone assumed was white is Black — and underscores one about ours: Justice often comes at a steep price. — Maria Fontoura

The Golden Girls, “Mrs. George Devereaux” (Season 6, Episode 9)

THE GOLDEN GIRLS -- "Mrs. George Devereaux" Episode 9 -- Aired 11/17/90 -- Pictured: (l-r) Bea Arthur as Dorothy Petrillo Zbornak, Rue McClanahan as Blanche Devereaux, Betty White as Rose Nylund, Estelle Getty as Sophia Petrillo (Photo by Ron Tom/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)

The Golden Girls experienced so many adventures together, as Dorothy (Bea Arthur), Rose (Betty White), Blanche (Rue McClanahan), and Sophia (Estelle Getty) lived together as pals and confidantes. But “Mrs. George Devereaux” is a truly touching treatment of grief and loss. Blanche, the most frivolous of the Girls (and the funniest), opens the door and beholds a strange sight: her late husband George, telling her that he faked his death and now wants her back. The episode explores how all the characters live with their different kinds of grief — and how that grief is what brought them here together in the first place. It has the most emotional resonance of any Golden Girls episode, but it’s also the funniest in terms of pure farcical comedy, as Dorothy gets swept up in a bizarre love triangle with two 1970s heartthrobs, guest stars Sonny Bono and Lyle Waggoner. As usual, Blanche gets the best line, when she confronts Cher’s ex-husband with the command, “Sonny Bono, get off my lanai!” — Rob Sheffield

SpongeBob SquarePants, “Pizza Delivery” (Season 1, Episode 5)

The absurdist humor that made SpongeBob SquarePants beloved across multiple generations is already at full strength in this early episode. At the end of another shift at the Krusty Krab, a customer calls in to order a pizza to be delivered to his home. Never mind that the restaurant doesn’t make pizzas: Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown) sees a few bucks to be earned, and somehow turns a Krabby Patty burger into a pizza, complete with box, then orders SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) and Squidward (Rodger Bumpass) to take it to its destination. Instead, SpongeBob’s usual difficulty with driving strands the odd couple far from Bikini Bottom, trying various bizarre methods to get home — all of them borrowed from the “pioneers,” like the idea of riding on giant rocks. In the end, we get one last, great punchline: The customer lives right next door to the Krusty Krab, and they could have just walked the pizza over to him. — A.S.

Roseanne, “War and Peace” (Season 5, Episode 14)

Both in its Nineties heyday and its modern reinvention as The Conners , Roseanne had a real knack for blending domestic comedy with candid material about poverty, addiction, sexuality, and more. In this terrific conclusion of a two-part story, Dan (John Goodman) gets hauled off to jail after beating up Fisher, the abusive boyfriend of Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), while Roseanne tends to her sister, and Darlene (Sara Gilbert) gets to briefly relish the sight of her disciplinarian father behind bars. “War and Peace” doesn’t hide from the horror of Jackie’s experience, but even its dark moments are flavored with sass, like when Roseanne warns Fisher, “If you ever come near her again, you’re gonna have to deal with me, and I am way more dangerous than Dan. I got a loose-meat restaurant. I know what to do with the body!” — A.S.

The Dick Van Dyke Show, “Never Bathe on Saturday” (Season 4, Episode 27)

LOS ANGELES - FEBRUARY 16: THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW episode: "Never Bathe on Saturday". Mary Tyler Moore (as Laura Petrie). Image dated February 16, 1965. (Photo by CBS via Getty Images)

Somehow, the best showcase for Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore as one of TV’s all-time couples is in an episode where Moore is frequently off-camera. A romantic getaway for Rob and Laura goes horribly awry when Laura’s big toe gets stuck in a hotel bathtub faucet, the bathroom door gets locked, and Rob makes the ill-timed decision to draw a fake mustache on his upper lip that he can’t wipe off — leading every hotel worker who arrives to help assuming he’s up to no good. Written by Dick Van Dyke Show creator Carl Reiner, this installment keeps finding new and amusing ways to escalate the sticky situation, and to push the outer edge of the envelope of censorship circa 1965, with a story about the risk of other people seeing Laura naked. By this point in the series’ run, Reiner knew exactly how to use his leading man’s fluency with physical comedy, and how his leading lady’s voice on the other side of that locked door was all that was needed to sell Laura’s dismay at being trapped in such an embarrassing position. — A.S.

Black Mirror, “San Junipero” (Season 3, Episode 4)

What would your ideal afterlife look like? Black Mirror — the British dystopian anthology series with a nihilistic approach to rapidly-developing technology — is known for being a show that doesn’t only answer questions about the future but depicts the worst possible alternative you’ve never even considered. Maybe that’s why, when fans were introduced to the couple at the heart of “San Junipero,” and found the answer of the ideal afterlife to be an Eighties beach town party that never ends, they responded so fondly. Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) and Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) meet on a night out and quickly fall into a romantic entanglement. But what begins as a love story about two lesbians finding each other in a heaven on earth is quickly revealed to be a virtual reality — one where the elderly and those who have died can be uploaded and then live on forever as their younger selves. The two — both dying in real life — must deal with whether or not the love they’ve found in pixels is enough for both of their forevers. It’s a touching love story that embodies Black Mirror at its very best. — CT Jones

Sex and the City, “My Motherboard, My Self” (Season 4, Episode 8)

Family is, arguably, everywhere in Sex and the City — from those the core four start with their partners to the ones they marry into (have there ever been more terrifying mothers-in-law than Frances Sternhagen or Anne Meara?) and the one they build just among themselves. But when it comes to the blood relations of Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Samantha (Kim Cattrall), the show is surprisingly thin, which is what makes “My Motherboard, My Self” stand out so much. It’s not that the other subplots aren’t memorable — the endless physical comedy of Samantha losing her orgasm; Carrie’s Macintosh meltdown and trip to Manhattan 1990s mainstay Tekserve (R.I.P.), where technician Dmitri (a brilliantly dry Aasif Mandvi) rags on her for not “backing up” — but Miranda’s turn here feels different. As she attends her mother’s funeral in Philadelphia (where she is, apparently, from, and where she has, apparently, multiple siblings), we see a more human side of a character who until this point has largely maintained her station as “the analytical one.” (Though it’s notable that the most intimate moment she has in the City of Brotherly Love isn’t with a direct relation, but the fitting room attendant trying to sell her a bra.) While the show has been criticized for celebrating solipsistic behavior, this episode is a prime example of the four women grappling with their ability to be vulnerable. — Elisabeth Garber-Paul

Broad City, “Knockoffs” (Season 2, Episode 4)

Both stories in the stoner comedy’s most laugh-out-loud installment involve imitation products. In one, Ilana (Ilana Glazer) and her mother Bobbi (Susie Essman) travel into the sewers of Manhattan to obtain counterfeit designer purses. In the other, Abbi (Abbi Jacobson) is shocked when her boyfriend Jeremy (Stephen Schneider) asks her to peg him with a strap-on — a development that so thrills Ilana, she does an upside-down twerk on her friend’s behalf — then has to scramble to find a reasonable facsimile after her dishwasher melts Jeremy’s custom-made dildo. In the end, the replacements prove shoddier than the real thing, but “Knockoffs” is so perfectly constructed, and so memorable, that when the friends met Hillary Clinton in a later episode later, among the first things a flustered Abbi can think to tell her is, “I pegged!” — A.S.

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Excuse” (Season 4, Episode 24)

When The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air went on the air in 1990, Will Smith was such an inexperienced actor that he literally mouthed the lines of his co-stars while they spoke. But it didn’t take long for Smith to learn his craft and land roles in dramatic movies like Six Degrees of Separation . That’s why the creative team behind this series knew he was ready for a Season Four episode where Will reunites with his father (played by Ben Vereen) 14 years after he walked out on the family, only to see him leave once again after they reconciled. “I’ll be a better father than he ever was, and I sure as hell don’t need him for that, ’cause ain’t a damn thing he could ever teach me about how to love my kids!” Smith roars, before breaking down in the arms of Uncle Phil. “How come he don’t want me, man?” For anyone who grew up without a father, the moment cut deep. “I shed a tear til this day every time I see this episode,” LeBron James wrote on Instagram in 2015. “This hit home for me growing up and I couldn’t hold my tears in. Til this day they still coming out when this episode come on.” — Andy Greene

Doctor Who, “Blink” (Season 3, Episode 10)

The scariest, cleverest episode of the British sci-fi institution Doctor Who features monsters who are elegant in their simplicity: the Weeping Angels, predatory aliens who resemble stone statues of angels, and who can only move when you’re not looking at them. Writer Steven Moffat places these disturbing creatures in service of a story that barely features the Doctor (David Tennant) and his then-companion Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), instead focusing on a young Carey Mulligan as Sally Sparrow, a woman who keeps running afoul of the Weeping Angels. Her only hope of surviving the ordeal comes in the form of a DVD Easter Egg that creates the illusion of the Doctor having a conversation with her, and even the Time Lord himself struggles to adequately explain all the seeming paradoxes contained within Moffat’s tale. “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect,” he tells Sally, “but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.” Yet it all makes exciting sense by the end. — A.S.

Alias, “Truth Be Told” (Season 1, Episode 1)

64986_15_3 ALIAS - (Photo by via Getty Images) JENNIFER GARNER

Throughout his career, J.J. Abrams has struggled with endings, as anyone who sat through The Rise of Skywalker can tell you. Few, though, are better at beginnings, and the pilot episode of his spy drama Alias is so fantastic that it bought years of goodwill from viewers, no matter how nonsensical the plots grew as the show went along. While undercover agent Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) is in Taiwan being interrogated by a torture expert, we flash back through the events that led her here, starting with her double life as a grad student by day, CIA agent by night. This turns out to be a triple life when Sydney discovers that she’s been tricked into working for a terrorist organization called SD-6, and that her father, Jack (Victor Garber), is secretly her co-worker. Oh, and Sydney’s fiancé gets murdered on the order of SD-6 boss Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin), plus a half-dozen other characters have to be introduced, Sydney has to try on multiple hair colors and accents, and more. Between the fractured timeline and the multiple lies Sydney has to live at once, “Truth Be Told” should be absolute gibberish. But Abrams, in one of his earliest efforts as director as well as writer, keeps everything coherent and thrilling in an episode that made him into a star just as much as it did Jennifer Garner. — A.S.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, “Mac Bangs Dennis’ Mom” (Season 2, Episode 4)

Most of the time, the Paddy’s Pub gang aim to screw over other people but really just end up screwing themselves, and that’s just what happens in this crude, tangled adventure. When Frank (Danny DeVito) promotes Charlie (Charlie Day) from a sleazy janitor to manager of the bar, he sets in motion a dizzying sequence of events that puts each character’s Achilles’ heels on full display: Mac’s (Rob McElhenny) sensitivity, Frank’s lost youth, Dennis’ (Glenn Howerton) pride, Charlie’s unrequited love, and Dee’s (Kaitlin Olson) conniving impulses. In order to get out of the grunt work Charlie left behind, Dennis goes on a mission to sleep with the unnamed character the Waitress (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), but ends up setting his sights on Mac’s mom (and later Charlie’s) when he finds out Mac banged his mom (and Frank’s ex-wife). Meanwhile, Charlie draws up a plan to finally bang the Waitress; Dennis’ sister Dee isn’t looking for sex, just power, as she plays the henchman to Charlie’s mastermind; and Frank just wants to bang any “young broad” who will give him the time of day. “That doesn’t make any sense,” Mac says to Charlie after encouraging Mac to sleep with Dennis’ mom. Charlie’s response pretty much sums up the entire FX sitcom: “It doesn’t have to.” — Maya Georgi

Grey’s Anatomy, “It’s the End of the World/As We Know It” (Season 2, Episodes 16 & 17)

UNITED STATES - DECEMBER 13: GREY'S ANATOMY - "It's the End of the World (As We Know It)" (Photo by Peter "Hopper" Stone/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)

Hearing main character Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) refuse to get out of bed for fear that she’ll die at work should have been a clue that it wouldn’t be a good week. But viewers were still terrified when the series seemingly tried its hardest to make every main character (plus guest stars Christina Ricci and Kyle Chandler) have near-death experiences in this two-parter, which began airing after Super Bowl XL. Bailey (Chandra Wilson) is in labor at the hospital waiting for her husband, who won’t answer his phone. Derek (Patrick Dempsey) can’t concentrate on saving his patient’s life while the man’s cell keeps going off (put two and two together here). And when a newbie paramedic shoves her hands into the chest cavity of a patient who’s bleeding out, it’s Meredith who learns that what’s currently killing him is unexploded ammunition that could go off at any minute, taking her and the entire O.R. with it. The bomb squad evacuates the floor, but if Derek leaves, Bailey’s husband dies. Meredith steps in for the paramedic, who’s had a panic attack, so now, if Meredith moves, she and Derek and Bailey’s husband die. Richard (James Pickens, Jr.) has a heart attack from the stress of the evacuation. Izzy (Katherine Heigl) and Alex (Justin Chambers) are off hooking up in a closet, which is also life-threatening if you consider Alex’s numerous confirmed STDs. And if Bailey, who is refusing to push without her husband being present, doesn’t give birth, she and the baby will die. It’s an all-in, melodramatic pivot for a series that has since become known for putting its main characters in life-threatening situations. And yet, in the midst of these increasingly heightened stakes, the standout scene remains George’s (T.J. Knight) gentle cajoling that finally convinces Bailey to push — and to name her son after him. “You’re Doctor Bailey,” he says, in a scene that remains one of the most tender of the entire series. “You don’t hide from a fight.” — CTJ

Girls, “American Bitch” (Season 6, Episode 3)

If ever Hannah Horvath was a voice of a generation, this was it. Airing just a few months before the #MeToo movement exploded in 2017, this quiet cri de coeur — in which famous author Chuck Palmer (Matthew Rhys, nimble as ever) confronts Hannah (Lena Dunham) about a blog post she wrote slamming his alleged misconduct with several college girls — taps into every conversation we’re still having about power and consent. Chuck summons Hannah to his stately apartment, where she attempts to explain why taking advantage of his literary stature to hook up with young women is predatory, while he hurls every trick in the Bad Men Handbook at her: flattery (“You’re very bright”); faux honesty (“I’m a horny motherfucker with the impulse control of a toddler”); defensiveness (“These girls throw themselves at me!”); casual intimacy (“You’re more to me than just a pretty face”). With astonishing precision and economy, Dunham turns the tables such that by the end of the episode — that is, by the time Chuck and Hannah are lying clothed atop his bed, and he takes out his dick and flops it onto her thigh — Hannah has fallen prey to the very manipulations she was calling out. A hallmark moment in a show that will only age better with time. — M.F.

Everybody Loves Raymond, “Baggage” (Season 7, Episode 22)

Like Carl Reiner once did with The Dick Van Dyke Show , Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal liked to come up with stories by asking his writers what they’d been up to with their families lately. More often than not, there was a conflict that mapped pretty easily onto the Barone family, like an argument that writer Tucker Cawley had with his wife about who would put away the last suitcase left over from a recent vacation. The fictionalized version of it becomes a cold war of sorts between Ray (Ray Romano) and Debra (Patricia Heaton), even as Marie (Doris Roberts) compares the stalemate to a fight that once almost wrecked her marriage to Frank (Peter Boyle). (This leads to one of the great sitcom lines that makes zero sense out of context and seems absolutely logical in context: “Don’t let a suitcase filled with cheese be your big fork and spoon.”) The whole thing culminates in a slapstick battle between the spouses, demonstrating the impressive physical-comedy chops that Romano and Heaton developed over the series’ run. — A.S.

King of the Hill, “Bobby Goes Nuts” (Season 6, Episode 1)

Some episodes made this list because they do innovative things with episodic structure, or because they have something deep to say about the human condition. This one’s here because Bobby Hill (Pamela Adlon) kicks a bunch of guys in the groin. Well, no. This one’s here because he learns to do this from taking a women’s self-defense class at the Y — at the unwitting urging of Hank (Mike Judge), who just wants his son to learn how to stand up to bullies — and incorporates not only the crotch attacks, but a high-pitched screech of, “THAT’S MY PURSE! I DON’T KNOW YOU!” every time he does it, just like he and his middle-aged, female classmates were taught. Sometimes, you just have to cherish the little things, you know? — A.S.

Insecure, “High-Like” (Season 3, Episode 5)

The struggling women of Insecure can’t even catch a break when they head to Coachella to see Beyoncé headline. Newly unemployed Issa (Rae) needs everything to go perfectly for the group’s last hurrah before Tiffany (Amanda Seales) gives birth, while Molly (Yvonne Orji) is preoccupied with work, and Keli (Natasha Rothwell) just wants to have a good time. The girls (minus Tiffany, or so we thought…) take edibles and pop so much MDMA they are forced to miss Bey, instead finding themselves in a drug-fueled frenzy that makes the chaos and humor feel like they’re seeping through the screen. Keli takes “Beyoncé or bust” too far and pisses herself after getting Tasered by festival security. Tiffany cries in a closet and tells her husband, “It’s our weed, baby” after admitting to “one bite” of a pot brownie. Molly bugs out and types nonsense on her work laptop, while Issa insists the mess of the night is all her fault. For an episode that starts with a silly Thug Yoda appearance and ends with the abrupt, emotionally-charged return of Issa’s ex-boyfriend, Lawrence (Jay Ellis), it packs in one hell of a trip. — M.G.

Game of Thrones, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” (Season 8, Episode 2)

Because Game of Thrones presented spectacle on a scale never before seen on television, it’s easy to forget that the series first became beloved when its budget was much smaller and it couldn’t afford to depict massive battles, dragon attacks, or ice zombie hordes. That stuff, when it came with frequency, was icing on the cake that was the deep roster of memorable characters George R.R. Martin had created, who the GoT writers brought to such vivid life. Even in its later, more epic seasons, the show was still most potent when it placed people first and carnage second. “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” takes place the evening before a coalition of heroes from across Westeros will face the Night King and his undead army. It’s almost all talking, as the characters have the kinds of conversations you’d expect when they don’t believe they’ll survive the next day. The most powerful of these is the moment that provides the episode with its title, as Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) realizes that, by the laws of Westeros, he can fulfill the dreams of his old friend Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) and grant her the knighthood she spent her whole life believing her gender disqualified her from achieving. The actual battle with the Night King winds up being the most visually underwhelming episode of the series, but writer Bryan Cogman’s love letter to these characters still resonates years later. — A.S.

The Good Place, “Michael’s Gambit” (Season 1, Episode 13)

THE GOOD PLACE -- "Michael's Gambit" Episode 113 -- Pictured: (l-r) Ted Danson as Michael, Kristen Bell as Eleanor Shellstrop -- (Photo by: Vivian Zink/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)

TV has a mixed track record with twist endings. For every Twilight Zone , it seems there are a half-dozen disasters like the Dexter season where Edward James Olmos was a ghost, or the Westworld season where Ed Harris and Jimmi Simpson were playing the same character — both ideas that fans sniffed out long before those series’ producers expected them to. But then there is the marvelous conclusion to the first season of the metaphysical comedy The Good Place . For the previous 12 episodes, Eleanor (Kristen Bell) and her friends had struggled to figure out why the seemingly perfect afterlife in which they found themselves had so many obvious flaws. In the end, it’s dum-dum Eleanor who’s the only one smart enough to see through the genial exterior of their host, Michael (Ted Danson), and recognize that, for all their worry of ending up in the Bad Place, “ This is the Bad Place!” In hindsight, the idea was clearly seeded; some viewers did guess it in advance, but not so many that it ruined the surprise for everyone else. Rather than undercut everything that happened before, the twist is in keeping with the show’s basic premise about heaven being not all it’s cracked up to be. And it set the series off in new, increasingly wild directions, rather than repeating the same jokes about fro-yo for years on end. — A.S.

Star Trek, “City on the Edge of Forever” (Season 1, Episode 28)

LOS ANGELES - APRIL 6: Star Trek, The Original Series, episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" first broadcast on April 6, 1967. From left, Joan Collins (as Edith Keeler) and William Shatner (as Captain James T. Kirk) in year 1930. Image is a screen grab. (CBS via Getty Images)

This episode, written by author Harlan Ellison, offers one time-travel tragedy to rule them all. When a deliriously ill Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) staggers through a time portal on a mysterious planet, he somehow alters history enough that the Enterprise is no longer in orbit above the away team. It’s up to Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) to follow their friend, winding up in Depression-era New York, where interplanetary lothario Jim Kirk finds himself falling hard for do-gooder Edith Keeler (Joan Collins). Unfortunately, Spock figures out that Edith is a pivot point for the future of humanity, where her life will ironically lead to centuries of pain and misery, while her death will lead to the timeline our heroes know well. Torn between his duty to the galaxy and the desires of his own heart, Kirk allows Edith to be fatally struck by a car, in a tearjerker ending that wound up echoing throughout the future of TV science fiction. — A.S.

My So-Called Life, ”Pilot” (Episode 1)

UNITED STATES - AUGUST 25: MY SO-CALLED LIFE - pilot - 8/25/94, Claire Danes (pictured) played Angela Chase, a 15-year-old who wanted to break out of the mold as a strait-laced teen-ager and straight-A student. , (Photo by ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)

Meet Angela Chase, a high school sophomore who offers us a look into her life in a mundane suburb of Pittsburgh. She has a major crush on Jordan Catalano (“I just like how he’s always leaning. Against stuff. He leans great”) and is quite possibly the only person in history to be jealous of Anne Frank (“She was stuck in an attic for three years with this guy she really liked”). My So-Called Life premiered 30 years ago, giving teens a much more realistic portrayal of what it’s like to endure the “battlefield” that is high school over primetime soap operas like 90210. And the pilot lays that groundwork perfectly, with Angela (Claire Danes) narrating as she navigates her strained relationship with her mom, outgrows her best friend and abandons her for two cool, kindred spirits, and, yes, watches Jordan (Jared Leto) excel at leaning. A battlefield indeed. — Angie Martoccio

Master of None, “Thanksgiving” (Season 2, Episode 8)

Though Aziz Ansari was star, frequent writer, and occasional director of his series about an actor named Dev trying to find meaning in his life, he periodically turned over episodes from the first two seasons to other characters, demonstrating that their stories had just as much richness as Dev’s, if not more. “Thanksgiving” tracks many years of the holiday, as Dev’s best friend Denise (Lena Waithe, who co-wrote the episode with Ansari) gradually comes out to her family, slowly but surely wearing down the resistance of her mother (Angela Bassett), aunt (Kym Whitley), and grandmother (Venida Evans). Partly inspired by Waithe’s own coming-out story, the warm and knowing episode was such a creative success that when the series finally returned for a third season four years later, it was built entirely around Denise’s marriage, with Dev now a minor figure in what was once his own show. — A.S.

For All Mankind, “The Grey” (Season 2, Episode 10)

The second season of this sci-fi drama, set in an alternate timeline where the Soviets beat America to the moon, triggering a never-ending space race, is the platonic ideal of the intensely serialized, “10-hour Movie” approach so much of dramatic television has taken in the years since The Wire , and that so few shows actually do well. Everything that happens throughout Season Two, even the parts that seem slow and pointless when you first watch them, have thrilling payoffs in the finale , where Earth seems on the verge of nuclear Armageddon, while American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts wage war on and around the moon. All the earlier subplots matter, like Gordo (Michael Dorman) putting his new devotion to jogging to good use when he and ex-wife Tracy (Sarah Jones) have to run across the lunar surface, clad only in spacesuits jury-rigged out of duct tape, to prevent a nuclear meltdown. — A.S.

St. Elsewhere, “Time Heals” (Season 4, Episodes 17 & 18)

ST. ELSEWHERE -- "Time Heals: Part 1" Episode 17 -- Pictured: (l-r) Christina Pickles as Nurse Helen Rosenthal, Ed Flanders as Dr. Donald Westphall, Norman Lloyd as Dr. Daniel Auschlander -- Photo by: NBCU Photo Bank

This innovative hospital drama pushed the boundaries of its format throughout its run. One episode was set largely in the afterlife. Another told a quartet of stories about the stages of life from birth through death. The most audacious, and satisfying, of these, is the two-part “Time Heals,” which aired over consecutive nights. As St. Eligius prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary, we get glimpses of the hospital across the decades, and see how Dr. Westphall (Ed Flanders), Dr. Craig (William Daniels), and the other senior members of the staff each came to work there. Beyond all the backstory — including a great guest turn by Edward Hermann as Father McCabe, the priest who founded the hospital and helped raise the orphaned Westphall — “Time Heals” impresses because each vignette from the past is presented in the style of movies (or, in some cases, television) of that period: Scenes in the 1930s are in black and white, ones in the Sixties are much more brightly lit, and so on. — A.S.

Larry Sanders, “Flip” (Season 6, Episode 12)

“You could sense there would never be another show like that again,” The Larry Sanders Show actress Ileana Douglas said of the show’s final scene. “And there hasn’t been.” As Rip Torn, Jeffrey Tambor, and show creator Garry Shandling group-hug in an empty studio, a poignant sadness infuses the acerbic wit that Shandling’s revolutionary series displayed for six seasons. Set around Larry’s final show, the Peabody Award-winning episode features gags that remain timeless: Jim Carrey serenading Larry on-air while excoriating him off-air, Tom Petty telling Clint Black to “quiet down, cowpoke” before getting into a fistfight with Greg Kinnear, and Carol Burnett and Ellen DeGeneres catching Larry in a lie that destroys both the show-within-the-show itself and Larry’s glass-fragile ego. It’s a brilliant ending that balances pathos (“I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do without you,” Larry says to his audience before choking up. “God bless you. You may now flip”) with the series’ trademark send-up of Hollywood phoniness (Torn instinctively telling a bumped Bruno Kirby on the last show that “we’ll have you on another time.”) The show that invented the modern sitcom and stuck the landing perfectly. — Jason Newman

Orange Is the New Black, “Toast Can’t Never Be Bread Again” (Season 4, Episode 13)

The Netflix prison series is the only show in Emmy history to be reclassified from the comedy categories to the drama ones, in part because its tone was so elusive, even to the people making it. But when Orange wanted to get totally serious, it was incredible, like in this episode set in the aftermath of the shocking death of beloved inmate Poussey at the hands of a guard. As Taystee (Danielle Brooks) and the other women grieve the loss of Poussey, then fume at the realization that the guard will go unpunished while most of them are stuck behind bars for much lesser crimes, their pain and rage boils over into a prison riot that will take up the entire following season. — A.S.

The Andy Griffith Show, “Opie the Birdman” (Season 4, Episode 1)

LOS ANGELES - AUGUST 19: The Andy Griffith Show, episode 'Opie The Birdman'. (From left) Andy Griffith (as Andy Taylor)' and Ron Howard (as Opie) appear on the "Opie the Birdman" episode of The Andy Griffith Show on August 19, 1963. (Photo by CBS via Getty Images)

The Andy Griffith Show set the template for broad, light, homespun small-town humor, but the best episode of the long-running 1960s show is as raw as a modern prestige TV feelings-fest. Gifted a slingshot by Don Knots’ iconically bumbling deputy Barney Fife, a young Opie Taylor (played by a nine-year-old Ron Howard) accidentally kills a bird, orphaning its three young offspring. “You gonna give me a whippin’?” Opie asks his father, Sheriff Andy Taylor, played by the show’s star, Andy Griffith. Not this time. Instead, TV’s all-time cool-headed dad simply opens Opie’s window so his boy can listen to the newly motherless baby birds in the tree outside, filling the Mayberry night with their desolate emo chirps. Howard later said the tears he cried in the scene where he kills the bird were real, because he was thinking of his recently deceased dog. The episode doesn’t have any big laughs, a bold move considering it was a season-opener. But by breaking with formula, they made a heartbreaking classic. — Jon Dolan

Good Times, “The I.Q. Test” (Season 2, Episode 7)

As the Seventies sitcom’s iconic gospel theme song noted, there was a lot of scratchin’ and survivin’ to do for the Evans family in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects. And the Maude spinoff was so smart in illustrating the many ways the deck was stacked against Florida (Esther Rolle), James (John Amos), and their kids. In “The I.Q. Test,” everyone is shocked when gifted youngest son Michael (Ralph Carter) flunks a school standardized test, until Michael explains that he refused to finish after recognizing that the test is racially biased, with questions geared towards the experience of reasonably well-off white children. The episode nimbly addresses systemic problems in a way that few shows were even thinking about at the time, much less willing to incorporate into their scripts. And it does it while still having some fun with the situation, through the obliviousness of the white test proctor. — A.S.

Moonlighting, “Atomic Shakespeare” (Season 3, Episode 7)

UNITED STATES - NOVEMBER 25: MOONLIGHTING - "Atomic Shakespeare" -Season Three - 11/25/86, A schoolboy hoping to watch "Moonlighting" but forced to study Shakespeare, daydreams about the cast performing their own version of "The Taming of the Shrew" with Dave (Bruce Willis) as Petruchio and Maddie (Cybill Shepherd) as Kate., (Photo by ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)

At the point “Atomic Shakespeare” rolled around in the third season of Moonlighting , the private detective comedy had already established two things: 1) that the onscreen chemistry of co-stars Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd was as scorching as any couple — even an unconsummated one like this — ever put on television; and 2) that the show’s writers didn’t feel in any way bound by the conventions of genre or era, as they had already done a black-and-white film noir tribute, as well as put Willis’ David into a musical number helmed by Singin’ in the Rain director Stanley Donen. So it felt wholly natural to translate the familiar David and Maddie dynamic back to Shakespearean times, with a postmodern retelling of The Taming of the Shrew , with Willis and Shepherd playing David and Maddie-flavored versions of Petrucchio and Kate, and that at various points features ninjas, a horse wearing sunglasses, and wannabe blues singer Willis wailing on the classic rock hit “Good Lovin’.” The episode even gets away with rewriting the Bard: Instead of Kate submitting to Petrucchio’s insistence that the sun is in fact the moon, as a way of humoring her new husband, she instead stands her ground and gets him to admit that, “My wife hath called it: ’Tis the sun, and not the moon at all!” — A.S.

Severance, “The We We Are” (Season 1, Episode 9)

By the time we reach the Season One finale of the satirical workplace thriller Severance , the employees of the macrodata refinement department of Lumon Industries have reached their boiling point. Part of a cohort who volunteered for a surgical procedure that separates their work selves, called “Innies,” from their personal selves, called “Outies,” they all live bifurcated lives, where one half has no clue what the other half does. But now, the Innies, sure they’re getting the short end of the deal, are fed up. With the help of Dylan (Zach Cherry), who hacks into a control room, Helly (Britt Lower), Mark (Adam Scott), and Irving (John Turturro) find a way to inhabit their Outie personas — and, as a result, learn all kinds of things about themselves that they aren’t fully prepared to know. Mark faces his wife’s death in a car accident. Irving tries to reignite his workplace romance with Burt (Christopher Walken), who retired his Innie self. And Helly is shocked to discover she’s descended from the family that championed Lumon’s severance procedure. A master class in building and maintaining tension, the episode reaches a heart-racing crescendo before an abrupt, cliffhanger ending. Premiering two years after the pandemic, as many employees returned to the office with shifted priorities and revamped notions of “work-life balance,” the Dan Erickson-created, Ben Stiller -directed series captures something essential about our modern malaise. But as the mirror maze of this episode shows, completely severing work and home may not be the fix we think it would. — Kalia Richardson

Review With Forrest MacNeil, “Pancakes, Divorce, Pancakes” (Season 1, Episode 3)

In this cult comedy, Andy Daly plays Forrest MacNeil, a pompous fool who has committed himself to the self-destructive task of undergoing and reviewing whatever life experiences his viewers ask him to. Installments prior to this one saw Forrest becoming addicted to cocaine, acting racist, and trying to make a sex tape. But the true folly of the exercise doesn’t hit until the third episode, where two different binge-eating assignments are wrapped around Forrest having to divorce his wife, without even being allowed to explain to her why he’s doing it. It’s a classic case of a joke building and building, until we get a traumatized Forrest declaring to his awful audience, “Perhaps I simply understood, from the darkest corner of my soul, that these pancakes couldn’t kill me, because I was already dead.” — A.S.

Homeland, “Q&A” (Season 2, Episode 5)

Damian Lewis as Nicholas "Nick" Brody and Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison in Homeland (Season 2, Episode 9). - Photo: Kent Smith/SHOWTIME - Photo ID: Homeland_ 209_0616

When this spy thriller about domestic terrorism ended its first season without brainwashed double agent Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) going through with a planned suicide bombing, it felt like a failure of nerve from the creators of a show that would have been best served as a one-and-done. But the first half of Season Two, featuring an ongoing cat-and-mouse game between Brody and CIA analyst Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), was excellent, and led to the series’ single-best episode, where Brody gets arrested and Carrie is given a limited window to interrogate him in the hopes of turning him into an asset. Danes and Lewis put on a mesmerizing acting duet, so potent it’s easy to ignore a silly subplot about Brody’s daughter Dana (Morgan Saylor) and her boyfriend Finn (a young Timothée Chalamet) getting into a hit-and-run incident. It was largely downhill for Homeland from here, at least until the producers were finally willing to kill off Brody for real, but that takes nothing from “Q&A.” — A.S.

China Beach, “Hello Goodbye” (Season 4, Episode 16)

CHINA BEACH - "Hello-Goodbye" - Airdate: July 22, 1991. (Photo by ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)
DANA DELANY

Long before cable and streaming dramas began to experiment with fractured timelines, there was the final season of this wildly underrated series about the staff of a U.S. Army hospital base during the Vietnam War. Episodes bounced back and forth between events at various points in the war and in the lives of nurse Colleen McMurphy (Dana Delany) and her surviving colleagues throughout the Seventies and Eighties. Much of the series finale takes place in 1988, as recovering alcoholic McMurphy warily attends a China Beach reunion event, then joins her pals in an impromptu (and incredibly poignant) visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, D.C. But “Hello Goodbye” also takes us back to China Beach one last time, to show us McMurphy caring for a dying soldier she knows she can’t save, as a closing reminder of the costs of war, whether or not you fight in them. — A.S.

The Jeffersons, “Sorry, Wrong Meeting” (Season 7, Episode 14)

All in the Family , the parent show of The Jeffersons , had already done a story about the Ku Klux Klan four years prior to the KKK-themed “Sorry, Wrong Meeting.” But the very nature of the spinoff and its leading man made the latter episode feel anything like a rehash. A racist neighbor decides that he can’t tolerate the presence of Black tenants like George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) and hosts a Klan rally to drive this undesirable element out of the building. But he invites the supremely WASPy Tom Willis (Franklin Cover), not realizing that Tom is best friends with George. Tom mistakenly assumes that the meeting will be about a recent spate of break-ins, and later suggests George attend with him. It’s a perfect set-up for both comedy and drama, as an oblivious George enters and cheers on what he thinks is rhetoric aimed solely at low-class criminals, rather than an upstanding businessman like himself, while the meeting’s vile host is shocked by his presence. But then some earlier business about CPR training leads to a great, dramatic climax: This spectacle agitates the Klan leader into a heart attack, and George turns out to be the only one in the room capable of saving the life of someone who thinks of him as less than human. — A.S.

What We Do in the Shadows, “On the Run” (Season 2, Episode 6)

For a show that specializes in absurdist, nonsensical humor, creator Jemaine Clement and company take it next-level with “On the Run.” The episode plucks pompous vampire Laszlo ( Matt Berry , who in July finally got an Emmy nomination for his work on this show) out of Staten Island, where he lives with four roommates — his undead wife Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), energy vampire Colin Robinson (Mark Prosch), 760-year-old Nandor (Kayvan Novak), and Nandor’s familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) — and relocates him to small-town Pennsylvania, where he’s hoping to escape an old friend (Mark Hamill) who’s come to collect on a nearly two-century-old debt of unpaid rent. A stranger in a strange land, Laszlo goes undercover as a “regular human bartender” named Jackie Daytona and, naturally, becomes an avid supporter of the local girls’ volleyball team. His disguise of dark-wash jeans and a toothpick is enough to fool his pursuer… until a mirror (and the removal of the toothpick from his mouth) exposes his true identity. Fully withdrawn from the show’s usual despondent setting, “On the Run” humorously plays Laszlo’s macabre nature against his desire to help 14-year-old girls make it to their state championship. What more could you want from a small-town, salt-of-the-earth bloodsucker? — CTJ

Friday Night Lights, “Mud Bowl” (Season 1, Episode 20)

When a train derailment near the school forces the relocation of a crucial playoff game, Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler), seeking a neutral battleground, opts for the most retro possible site: a cow pasture that turns into a swampy mess after a downpour starts during the contest. While everyone else thinks the coach has lost his mind by eschewing a modern facility, he sees it as a back-to-basics location that will allow himself, his players, and the Dillon High School fans to reconnect with the pure essence of the sport, rather than all of the usual cynical distractions. In the same way, “Mud Bowl” provides the most concentrated blast of emotions that this most heart-tugging of all dramas ever provided: the joy of seeing the Panthers have fun and play well despite the weather conditions, and the horror of Tyra (Adrianne Palicki) barely fighting off a rapist while skipping the game to study. — A.S.

Better Things, “Batceañera” (Season 4, Episode 9)

BETTER THINGS "Batceñera” Episode 9 (Airs Thursday, April 23) -- Pictured: Hannah Alligood as Frankie. CR: Suzanne Tenner/FX

Pamela Adlon’s stunning, semi-autobiographical comedy-drama about Sam Fox, a single mom-slash-actress raising three daughters, is packed with installments that feel worthy of being called the best, but “Batceñera” brilliantly captures what makes this underrated gem of a show so special. It opens with a surprise: Frankie (Hannah Alligood), Sam’s headstrong middle daughter, perfectly reenacting a Jerry Lewis bit from Who’s Minding the Store? set to composer Leroy Anderson’s “The Typewriter.” The heart of the episode is the blending of a bat mitzvah and a quinceañera for 15-year-old Frankie and her friend Reinita, respectively. The episode has everything: carnitas and knishes, a replica of Frida Kahlo’s suit, an all-female mariachi band, great needle-drops, poignant mother-daughter exchanges with each girl, Sam’s ex finally feeling a bit of proper shame for not being there for his kids, and much, much more. It’s a batceañera you never want to end. — Lisa Tozzi

The Honeymooners, “The Man From Space” (Episode 14)

For fans of The Honeymooners , it’s impossible to choose an all-time favorite episode, but like Jackie Gleason himself, “The Man From Space” is one of the greats. Originally airing on New Year’s Eve 1955, it pit Gleason’s blustering Ralph Kramden against his dimwitted pal o’ mine Ed Norton (Art Carney) in the Raccoon Lodge costume contest. Norton rents his outfit — a foppish French getup that’s supposed to evoke the engineer who built the sewers of Paris — while Ralph aims to prove he can do better by making a costume out of everyday items: a flashlight, the ice-box door, a kitchen pot as a helmet. His vision is “the man from space,” but neither his long-suffering wife Alice (Audrey Meadows) nor Norton take it that way. When the live audience finally sees Ralph emerge in all his resplendent glory, their reaction is unhinged, even as pieces of his spacesuit unexpectedly fall to the floor, teeing up a classic Gleason ad lib: “Let me have that,” he barks at Alice, “that’s my denaturizer.” The final scene at the costume party, with Norton barging in from his shift in the sewer in a gas mask, is one for the ages. — Joseph Hudak

Six Feet Under, “Everyone’s Waiting” (Season 5, Episode 12)

Alan Ball’s HBO drama usually kicked off its episodes with a grisly and/or highly ironic death. For the series finale, however, the showrunner opted for something a little different: He’d begin the last chapter of the Fisher family and their associates not with a life being snuffed out, but with a birth — and then he’d end the show not with one death, but a dozen. Having spent the bulk of its swan song tying up all of its loose narrative ends, Six Feet Under then shows us how every one of its surviving main characters would eventually shuffle off this mortal coil: Matriarch Ruth Fisher will die of old age with her family around her; Federico has a heart attack on a cruise ship; David’s security-guard husband Keith is murdered during a robbery, etc. Set to the Sia song “Breathe,” this justly praised montage doubles as a full-frontal assault on your tear ducts. It saves Claire’s passing for last, and before she takes her last breath at age 102, we see evidence of friends, loved ones, professional accolades, and personal memories all around her. For a series so devoted to sudden death, it goes out with a tribute to a long life well-lived. — David Fear

Columbo, “Etude in Black” (Season 2, Episode 1)

As rumpled homicide detective Lt. Columbo, Peter Falk was so superhumanly charming that he could have onscreen chemistry with a doorknob. But the iconic mystery series was at its best whenever Falk had a strong foil. This episode, with the dogged cop trying to prove a famous orchestra conductor murdered his mistress, has a home-field advantage in this regard, as the bad guy is played by Falk’s close friend and frequent collaborator John Cassavetes. Beyond the actors’ ease around one another, the dynamic crackles because the Columbo formula depends on the killers being too arrogant to assume this mumbling schnook could possibly outsmart them — and Cassavetes had a gift for playing smug and irritated. — A.S.

Friends, “The One Where Everybody Finds Out” (Season 5, Episode 14)

FRIENDS -- "The One Where Everybody Finds Out" Episode 14 -- Air Date 02/11/1999 -- Pictured: (l-r) Matthew Perry as Chandler Bing, Courteney Cox as Monica Geller, Lisa Kudrow as Phoebe Buffay (Photo by NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)

The best Friends moments come from full-ensemble episodes (Season Three’s “ The One Where No One’s Ready ,” Season Seven’s “ The One With Monica’s Thunder ”) where all six buds join forces and create a killing floor of comedy. The result is always a propulsive 22 minutes that doesn’t have a single dull moment, and “ The One Where Everybody Finds Out ” is this dynamic at its best. Secret’s out: Everyone has found out about Monica and Chandler’s relationship (OK, maybe Ross is a little late), and the gang play a game of chicken, one-upping each other to see who cracks first. Phoebe’s line, “They don’t know that we know they know we know!” embodies everything great about this episode, and the wit and wordplay that make the series a classic. No surprise it was nominated for three Emmys. — A.M.

Jenna Ortega: Women 'Should Have Our Own Franchises' Not Just Spinoffs

She's Real
By Tomás Mier

Mia Farrow Opens Up About Actors Working With Woody Allen: 'I Completely Understand'

Artist vs The Art
By Kalia Richardson

Donald Trump Biopic 'The Apprentice' Launches Kickstarter to Boost Theatrical Release

Big Screen Business
By Jon Blistein

Conan O'Brien, David Blaine to Host Charity Dinners Supporting Cancer Research Center

See lady gaga's harley quinn sing a judy garland song to the joker in 'folie à deux', most popular, brad pitt and george clooney dance to 4-minute standing ovation for ‘wolfs’ during chaotic venice premiere, richard gere jokes he had "no chemistry" with julia roberts in 'pretty woman', new photos show that ben affleck is back to old habits amid jennifer lopez divorce, regina josé galindo puts her body on the line in her art confronting power, you might also like, busan film festival sets park chan-wook scripted netflix title ‘uprising’ as opener, expands program despite slashed funding, patrick schwarzenegger and abby champion are the faces of tommy hilfiger’s fall campaign, the best yoga mats for any practice, according to instructors, telluride wrap: cannes winners are festival crowdpleasers as ‘emilia pérez,’ ‘anora,’ and more launch oscar campaigns, court oks diamond sports’ nba, nhl deals ahead of key fall hearing.

COMMENTS

Meet one of the real Navy pilots behind 'Top Gun: Maverick'
In between scenes, Weisser says he and Cruise talked a lot about flying. Cruise has had his pilot's license since the early 90s. RELATED: The 'young guns' of Top Gun: Maverick sit down with CBS 8 ...
Is Tom Cruise a real pilot? All about his flying dream
Tom Cruise qualified as a pilot in 1994, nearly three decades ago. Cruise reportedly owns several planes, including a luxury Gulfstream jet and his beloved P-51 Mustang, a WWII fighter that'll appear in Top Gun. "The P-51 Mustang you see in the movie is actually my plane, so I got to pilot in those sequences," Cruise told Hello magazine.
American Made (2017)
American Made: Directed by Doug Liman. With Tom Cruise, Domhnall Gleeson, Sarah Wright, Jesse Plemons. The story of Barry Seal, an American pilot who became a drug-runner for the CIA in the 1980s in a clandestine operation that would be exposed as the Iran-Contra Affair.
What Planes Does Tom Cruise Own?
Summary. Tom Cruise is a licensed pilot with qualifications as a multi-engine instrument-rated pilot and helicopter flying skills. Cruise owns a collection of airplanes, including a vintage P-51 Mustang fighter from World War II and a Gulfstream IV G4 jet. There may be additional aircraft in Cruise's fleet, such as a HondaJet and a Bombardier ...
American Made (film)
American Made is a 2017 American action comedy film [3] [4] [5] directed by Doug Liman, written by Gary Spinelli, and starring Tom Cruise, Domhnall Gleeson, Sarah Wright, Alejandro Edda, Mauricio Mejía, Caleb Landry Jones, and Jesse Plemons. [6] It is inspired [7] by the life of Barry Seal, a former TWA pilot who became a drug smuggler for the Medellín Cartel in the 1980s and then, in order ...
How 'Top Gun: Maverick' honors the legacy of Black Navy pilots
May 24, 2022, 3:24 AM PDT. By Arturo Conde. Actor Jay Ellis remembers watching the 1986 movie "Top Gun" at an Air Force base in Austin, Texas. He was only 8 or 9 years old, and the blockbuster ...
Meet the Retired Navy Pilot Who Flew Tom Cruise's Jet in 'Top Gun
Cmdr. Frank "Walleye" Weisser, USN (Ret), transformed himself from a teenage aspiring SEAL at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., into a world-class stunt pilot who flew Tom Cruise's fighter jet in the 2022 blockbuster Top Gun: Maverick.. Now a real estate agent with his wife and a corporate pilot, Weisser would like to see servicemembers take their own chances when they transition ...
What Is the Real Story of 'Top Gun'?
In theaters now and filled with visual thrills and real-life air sequences, the Tom Cruise vehicle takes viewers back to fighter pilot school. But what is the U.S. Navy's real training program like?
L-39: The Plane Tom Cruise Used to Train for Top Gun: Maverick
Last month, Tom Cruise appeared on a pre-taped segment for The Late Late Show with James Corden.Cruise was promoting his new film Top Gun: Maverick, which is currently dominating the box office.Consistent with the theme of the film, Cruise took Corden flying, first in a gorgeous North American P-51 Mustang, and then, in the jet that happens to be the primary jet trainer of the Russian armed ...
Top Gun Flight Jacket's Hidden Messages
The 1986 blockbuster Top Gun is among the most scrutinized films in cinema history. The story of Maverick (Tom Cruise), a rebellious pilot at the elite Navy Fighter Weapons School, reportedly led to a surge in Navy recruitment, especially in aviation-related ratings; however, critics have cited unrealistic fighter tactics, editing mistakes, errors in terminology, and brazen career-ending ...
How they made Top Gun: Maverick the most realistic flying movie ever
Paramount Pictures. 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 ...
Top Gun: Maverick Video Shows The Insane Flight Training Tom Cruise And
Like any Tom Cruise action film, the training went full-stop to get the cast ready to pilot an F-18. There were levels to the fighter jet training. The movie icon eased the cast into aviation ...
Glen Powell Got Tom Cruise's Blessing to Do 'Devotion' and 'Top Gun'
Based on the true story of naval aviator duo Lt. Tom Hudner and Ensign Jesse Brown, 'Devotion' also stars Jonathan Majors and Joe Jonas, and marks Powell's second naval aviation film this year.
'Top Gun: Maverick' Cast & Character Guide: Who's Who in the ...
Meet the daring pilots joining Tom Cruise's Maverick in the Danger Zone, including Miles Teller, Glen Powell, Monica Barbaro, and more. ... Lyliana Wray has guest-starred on Black-ish, The Night ...
Welcome to Tom Cruise's Flight School for 'Top Gun: Maverick'
Max Temescu. 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 ...
Tom Cruise Flew Real Jets in Top Gun: Maverick
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 ...
Top Gun: Maverick Director Explains The Extreme Scene That The Navy
It's all in-camera, it's Tom Cruise at 550 knots, going 30 feet above ground through the Toiyabe [Canyon] low-level training grounds. That's a real Top Gun training thing, but they never fly ...
'Top Gun: Maverick's' "Darkstar" Mystery Plane Has Real ...
More Stories By Tom 2024 Presidential Election Debate Schedule: Dates, Times, Who'll Be There & Who Won't 2024-25 Awards Season Calendar - Dates For Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, Guilds & More
Inside Tom Cruise's Flight Training for 'Top Gun: Maverick'
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 ...
Tom Cruise's Outrageously Lavish Lifestyle Is Hard To Believe
Cruise has a pilot's license, which he reportedly acquired in 1994.He is also said to own three to five jets, per Forbes.In a promotional clip for "Top Gun: Maverick," Academy Award-winning writer ...
Meet the Pilots Taking to the Sky with Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick
Tom Cruise 's new fighter pilots are learning a thing or two from the iconic movie star. In six new images released from Paramount Studios, Cruise's Pete "Maverick" Mitchell is taking on ...
True Story Behind Top Gun—What to Know on Navy Pilot Program
Here's How Being a Navy Pilot Has Changed Since Then. 5 minute read. Actor Tom Cruise on the set of Top Gun, directed by Tony Scott. ... How Ukraine Beat Russia in the Battle of the Black Sea;
TOP GUN: MAVERICK Gets Remade with a Cat in the Pilot's Seat
Their latest cinematic crossover places an adorable black cat alongside Tom Cruise's iconic Navy pilot. Rather than serving with Goose (RIP Goose!) during his early flying days, Maverick had a ...
Tom Cruise pilots 'Top Gun: Maverick' plane during MTV Movie & TV
Tom Cruise won an award for best performance for his role in "Top Gun: Maverick" at the MTV Movie & TV Awards on Sunday, and made his acceptance speech while piloting the same P-51 Mustang ...
The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time
Our list of classic episodes starts with its most recent entry, from a January 2024 installment of the great FX anthology drama inspired by the work of the Coen brothers. Fargo Season Five dealt ...

Is Tom Cruise a real pilot? All about his flying dream

Tom Cruise has held a pilot’s license since 1994

Cruise didn’t get to fly the F-18 Super Hornet in Top Gun

RELATED ARTICLES

American Made

Top cast 99+

More like this

Did you know

User reviews 390

Technical specs

Related news

More to explore

Simple Flying

Which Airport’s Runways Are Furthest From The Terminal?

What kind of license does Cruise have?

Plane collection

Is there more?

‘Top Gun: Maverick’ stars hope the film’s Black pilots will inspire a new generation of fans

Representation on screen and in history

Playing a naval officer on the big screen

‘Top Gun’ Is Back. But Is the Elite Navy Fighter Pilot School Really Like the Movies?

19FortyFive

Smart Bombs: Military, Defense and National Security

Recent Posts

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

Related Articles

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

site categories

Sydney Odman

Related Stories

THR Newsletters

More from The Hollywood Reporter

'Top Gun: Maverick' Cast & Character Guide: Who's Who in the Legacy Sequel

Tom Cruise as Capt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell

Val Kilmer as Adm. Tom "Iceman" Kazansky

Miles Teller as Lt. Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw

Jennifer Connelly as Penny Benjamin

Lyliana Wray as Amelia Benjamin

Glen Powell as Lt. Jake "Hangman" Seresin

Monica Barbaro as Lt. Natasha "Phoenix" Trace

Lewis Pullman as Lt. Robert "Bob" Floyd

Jay Ellis as Lt. Reuben "Payback" Fitch

Danny Ramirez as Lt. Mickey "Fanboy" Garcia

Bashir Salahuddin as Wo-1. Bernie "Hondo" Coleman

Jon Hamm as Adm. Beau "Cyclone" Simpson

Charles Parnell as Adm. Solomon "Warlock" Bates

Ed Harris as Rear Admiral Chaster "Hammer" Cain

Cookie banner

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

Share this story

Share All sharing options for: Welcome to Tom Cruise’s Flight School for ‘Top Gun: Maverick’

Part 1: “I Never Signed That Waiver.”

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

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

Part 4: “Tom Cruise Is Maverick.”

Part 5: “Welcome to the Skies.”

The Best Movies at Telluride and the 10 Most Anticipated Fall Films

Top Gun: Maverick Director Explains The Extreme Scene That The Navy Pilot Flying Tom Cruise Said He'd Never Do Again

CINEMABLEND NEWSLETTER

Most Popular

site categories

‘Top Gun: Maverick’s’ Hypersonic “Darkstar” Mystery Plane Has A Real-World Relative

More Stories By Tom

Related Stories

'Top Gun: Maverick' Set To Take Breath Away With $142M+ Record Memorial Day Opening - Box Office

Canada's International South Asian Film Festival Unveils 2024 Lineup

Watch on Deadline

Must Read Stories

It’s Showtime For ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ With $145M Global Opening: Preview

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

The Overview

The Syllabus

Water Training

Enduring G-Forces

Entertainment

Tom Cruise's Outrageously Lavish Lifestyle Is Hard To Believe

He holds a pilot's license and has several private jets

Tom Cruise's real estate portfolio is worth hundreds of millions

The actor loves fast and expensive cars

Tom Cruise had a money-saving, quick divorce from Katie Holmes