Why Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible Stunts Keep Everyone On Set Holding Their Breath

Every "Mission: Impossible" movie has become a must-watch event, if for nothing else to see what insane stunt Tom Cruise did for real. The franchise has become synonymous with practicality and Cruise doing as much as he can on his own. It's made for some thrilling set pieces over the years, including one scene in "Dead Reckoning Part One" where the actor drives a motorcycle off a cliff before unveiling a parachute. 

Naturally, there's a level of risk with each practical stunt, to the point where Cruise wanted to do the motorcycle stunt first for "Mission: Impossible 7," so if he were seriously injured or died, they wouldn't have to go through as many reshoots. For this reason, director Christopher McQuarrie told Collider everyone holds their breath when Cruise puts his life on the line for the film's sake.

For McQuarrie, it all comes down to not knowing every single factor going into a scene, "They all have their own risks, and it's not always what you perceive the risk to be. For example, with the A400 [in 'Rogue Nation'], the concern was less that Tom would fall off the plane than he would be hit by a rock on the runway or a bird when we were in mid-air. So there's all of these different factors and variables that you're constantly thinking about that could go wrong outside of all the variables that you've eliminated." While the outcomes so far have been thrilling to watch, seeing Cruise do them in real-time is understandably scary. 

Christopher McQuarrie doesn't mince words. He explicitly says how Tom Cruise could've been killed doing any of the dangerous stunts throughout his tenure in the "Mission: Impossible" franchise. Obviously, it's a major production with a lot of money pouring in and a lot of people on-hand to help out. Cruise isn't merely doing these stunts willy-nilly. A lot of practice goes into ensuring everything is as safe as possible for the actor before he does them for real. While the team does everything in its power to maintain Cruise's safety, McQuarrie admits there's only so much they can do. 

For something of the scale of a classic "Mission: Impossible" stunt, McQuarrie describes everything that could theoretically go wrong: "When he went off that ramp, we didn't know what was going to happen. We didn't know if the bike would get away from him, we didn't know if a crosswind would tangle him up, and we didn't know if the drone would hit him based on the environment that we were in." With all that in mind, it makes sense why the people on set watching Cruise would be nervous until he's safely back on the ground. The director continued, "So once we called 'action,' you had to hold your breath until the parachute opened. That was pretty terrifying."

So far, the results have been a testament to the power of cinema and what a showman Tom Cruise is. It'll be interesting to see how he tops himself yet again for "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part Two."