“You can’t do that, that’s too dangerous”: Matt Damon Was Speechless After Listening to Tom Cruise’s Plans For His Scary Mission Impossible Stunts
Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One has already hit the theatres. With the hype around one of the most dangerous stunts in the seventh installment of the super spy drama franchise, the movie is expected to be one of the biggest summer blockbusters of 2023.
Tom Cruise’s love for edgy stunts with respect to the Mission Impossible franchise needs no explanation. From jumping from the world’s tallest building to leaping off a mountain cliff- the actor has mastered the art of executing death-defying stunts in a crystal clear manner.
Matt Damon On Tom Cruise’s Wild Approach Towards Stunts
During an appearance on Conan O’Brien’s podcast Team Coco, the Good Will Hunting actor spoke about stunts and his fear of heights. Matt Damon recalled a conversation he had with Tom Cruise during a dinner. He mentioned how Tom Cruise had beat Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol’s safety rules only to execute the famous Burj Khalifa stunt during the filming.
The Top Gun actor was not allowed to do the Burj Khalifa stunt by the safety guy on the set of Mission Impossible 4. Damon explained-
“There are the Tom Cruises of the world, who do their stunts, like literally hang off a plane and do that. I remember I had dinner with him once, where he ran around the building. And I go, ‘Can you tell me how that happened?’ And he’s a really intense guy, and he was like, ‘I’ll tell you how it happened!’ I go, ‘Alright.’ And I’m in.”
Matt Damon further mentioned-
“He goes, ‘I’ve been thinking about this shot for 15 years!’ And I’m like, ‘Wow, really?’ He goes, ‘So I go to the safety guy, and I lay it all out.’ The safety guy goes, ‘We can’t do that. It’s too dangerous, you can’t do that. So I get a new safety guy’ That’s the beginning of his story. And I just go, ‘Stop!’ That’s where we’re different. When the safety guy says no, I’m like, ‘Well, the safety guy says it’s not a good idea.’”
Matt Damon was amazed by the kind of approach Tom Cruise has while filming the death-defying stunts. According to him, there can be nobody like Tom Cruise in the movie industry when it comes to executing a stunt or an action sequence.
Simon Pegg Called Tom Cruise’s Motorcycle Stunt A Nail Biting One
Mission Impossible star Simon Pegg had a nail-biting moment when he saw Tom Cruise getting lost in the thin film of fog while executing the motorcycle stunt on the edges of Norway’s Helsetkopen mountain. During an interview with the media outlet Entertainment Weekly, the actor recalled-
“All the cast that were in Norway at the time, we all went up there together. It was a genuinely nail-biting experience.”
While talking about the death-defying stunt, Simon Pegg further went on to explain that no matter whatever safety measure one ends up taking, there is always that small percentage of uncertainty where things can turn upside down. He mentioned-
“Obviously, you hear the idea and you get an idea of what it is in your head. But it wasn’t until I got up there on the mountain that I realized just how death-defyingly awesome the whole thing was. For all his preparation, for all the parachute jumps he did, for all the motocross training, he did, there is still always a degree of uncertainty with something like that.”
Source: Team Coco
