Impossible’ stunts

At 62, Tom’s not on cruise control just yet.
Daredevil Tom Cruise, who’s famed for performing his own death-defying stunts in movies, has added another astounding feat to his risky resume.
The action star was spotted Monday filming a scene for “Mission: Impossible 8,” out next year, in which the actor perilously dangled midair from a yellow Stearman biplane high above Oxfordshire, England.
6 Tom Cruise was spotted hanging from a plane midair while filming “Mission: Impossible 8.” Click Media – Dean / SplashNews.com
6 “Mission: Impossible 8” hits theaters next year. Click Media – Dean / SplashNews.com
In the cockpit, the pilot wore a full-body green suit, which means the driver will surely be edited out of the final product. Cruise was also seen battling Esai Morales, who plays terrorist Gabriel, up in the air.
The “Top Gun” star has played IMF Agent Ethan Hunt for 28 years, and with every chapter, he keeps upping the danger factor.
From a watery nightmare to climbing the world’s tallest skyscraper, here are some of Cruise’s wildest “M:I” stunts of all time.
Holding his breath in ‘Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation’
6 Cruise said he held his breath for more than six minutes to film the scene.
One of the actor’s most viscerally frightening tricks came in 2015’s “Rogue Nation,” when he held his breath for several minutes underwater while his character dodged spinning metal bars.
Cruise actually trained to hold his breath for an unimaginable six and a half minutes — at the top range of what professional divers are able to do.
“We’re underwater and doing breath holds of six to six and a half minutes,” he told USA Today. “It’s very taxing stuff.”
Climbing the Burj Khalifa in ‘Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol’
6 When he climbed the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, he was suspended by only a cable. ©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection
At 2,722 feet tall, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, is the tallest structure in the world.
Child’s play for Cruise.
In an eight-minute sequence in 2011’s “Ghost Protocol,” the actor slowly ascends the outside of the actual building, hanging only from a wire, and then terrifyingly plummets down.
“Somebody said, ‘What if the cable breaks?’ ” stunt coordinator Gregg Smrz told Yahoo Entertainment. “And I said, ‘That’s not an option.’ We actually did the math, and there was enough time of free fall for him to text me on the way down, and for me to receive it!”
Driving a motorcycle off a cliff in ‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One’
6 Cruise really road a motorcycle off a cliff. ©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection
An iconic moment of “The Spy Who Loved Me” shows super spy James Bond skiing off a cliff and opening a Union Jack parachute. But it was a stuntman — not actor Roger Moore — taking his life in his own hands.
Well, Cruise one-upped 007 by driving a motorcycle himself off a mountainside and then parachuting down to Earth in 2023’s “Dead Reckoning Part One.”
More than that, he performed the incredible maneuver on the first day of filming.
“Well, we know either we will continue with the film or we’re not. Let’s know day one!” Cruise told Entertainment Tonight. “Let us know day one what is going to happen: Do we all continue or is it a major rewrite?”
Rock climbing in ‘Mission: Impossible II’
6 In “Mission: Impossible II,” Cruise climbed rocks with his bare hands.
“Dead Reckoning” was hardly Cruise’s first cliff.
Twenty-three years earlier in “Mission: Impossible II,” the actor gave audiences a taste of the badassery to come when he climbed a rock ledge with his bare hands — supported, as usual, by just a cable.
“I was really mad that he wanted to do it, but I tried to stop him and I couldn’t,” director John Woo told Entertainment Weekly. “I was so scared I was sweating. I couldn’t even watch the monitor when we shot it.”