Why Tom Cruise Will Never Die

By constantly putting his life at risk, Cruise has saved his career. The stunts have become so vital to the franchise that Cruise and McQuarrie have taken to planning them first, and then figuring out the plot later. “We start all these movies with each asking the other, ‘What do you want to do with this one?’ ” McQuarrie explained, at the première for “Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning” at Cannes. “I knew I had a submarine sequence,” he said, “and Tom wanted to do a wing-walking sequence.” In the first sequence, which was filmed in a nine-million-litre water tank, Cruise dives down to the wreckage of a Russian submarine. When he enters it, the sub starts to roll, making Cruise look like an errant sock in a gigantic washing machine. During filming, the actor did seventy-five-minute dives, which is “unheard of,” according to the film’s marine coördinator. He was also wearing a mask without a mouthpiece, which greatly restricted his oxygen. But it would have got in the way of the audience being able to see his face.

Cruise’s wing-walking sequence was somehow even more dangerous. (“ ‘I want to be zero G in between the wings of the plane,’ ” McQuarrie recalled the actor saying.) While shooting one element of the scene—which involves Cruise jumping from one plane to another, hanging out on the wing, and fighting his way into the cockpit, among other feats—McQuarrie recalls wanting to vomit. Cruise performed that stunt another eighteen times. “He wanted to do one more and that’s when I said no,” McQuarrie said. “I was, like, ‘Do not anger the gods. We have what we need.’ ”

Other actors, including those who have dabbled in stunt work, have expressed awe at Cruise’s level of dedication. “What Tom Cruise does is extraordinary and special,” Keanu Reeves once said. Reeves described himself as “on the ground playing in the mud,” whereas Cruise is “flying and jumping outside of buildings and helicopters.” Will Smith has said that when he started filming “Bad Boys for Life,” he was intent on performing his own stunts. “I was, like, Man, I’m better than Tom Cruise,” he said. But after Smith did two stunts, “I was, like, I’m not better than Tom Cruise.” Smith, unlike Cruise, has an Oscar. But Cruise has found a different way to set himself apart—by becoming the Daniel Day-Lewis of stunt work. “It communicates to an audience when it’s real,” he has said. “It’s different. There’s stakes.”

The actor is now sixty-two years old. Though “The Final Reckoning” is widely speculated to be the last film in the franchise, Cruise seems determined to keep giving viewers what they want. He has said that he wants to make “Mission: Impossible” movies until he’s in his eighties. A follow-up to “Top Gun: Maverick,” Cruise’s fighter-pilot drama, has been confirmed, as has a sequel to “Days of Thunder,” his Nascar movie from 1990. Cruise is also working with McQuarrie, as well as NASA and SpaceX, to create the first Hollywood action movie filmed in outer space. It seems likelier than ever that we’re going to kill Tom Cruise before he dies.

Thomas Cruise Mapother IV was born on the third of July—not the fourth—in 1962, in Syracuse, New York. He would later drop the “Mapother,” likely because “Tom Cruise” has a better ring to it, but also potentially to distance himself from his father. The actor has described him as a “merchant of chaos” who would lull Cruise into a false sense of security and then beat him. (His father died, of cancer, in 1984.) The family was poor, and they moved around a lot: Cruise has said that he attended more than a dozen schools growing up, including a Catholic seminary. He briefly aspired to be a priest, a dream that was cut short after he was caught, according to one former classmate, stealing alcohol from the Franciscan fathers.

Cruise was daring, even as a very young child. At four and a half, he has said, he climbed up to the roof of his house and jumped, inspired by a parachuting doll: “It’s that moment when you jump off the roof and you go, ‘This is not gonna work. This is terrible. I’m gonna die.’ ” He hit the ground hard. “I saw stars in the daytime for the first time, and I remember looking up, going, ‘This is very interesting.’ ” As he got older, he used his neighbors’ newly planted pine trees for high-jump practice, and he nearly killed himself riding a motorbike into a brick wall, according to an unauthorized biography by Andrew Morton. He channelled some of his energy into sports, but, Morton writes, he was known more for his “tough, unbridled aggression” than for his athletic ability. (“He was rough in floor hockey,” a childhood friend of the actor said. “He was hardheaded but not talented.”) In high school, Cruise says, a teacher encouraged him to try out for a production of “Guys and Dolls.” He got the lead; his former castmates told Morton that it was very clear, even then, that he was going to be famous. Cruise landed his first screen role less than a year later.

That same year he was in “Endless Love,” he starred in “Taps,” as a cadet at a military school that is getting shut down. Cruise’s character is brilliantly unhinged—when the cadets go into town, he starts firing his M16 rifle to intimidate some locals; later, he unleashes a rain of bullets on the National Guard troops who have come to close the academy. He was praised for his performance, but it was his role in “Risky Business,” in 1983, that propelled him to a new level of fame. In it, Cruise plays a high-school student who turns his house into a brothel while his parents are out of town. It’s a coming-of-age movie, but it’s strangely poignant: the late film critic Roger Ebert wrote that Cruise “knows how to imply a whole world by what he won’t say, can’t feel, and doesn’t understand.” His character, Joel, became an icon, in part because of a famous underwear-dance scene, which Cruise largely improvised. Ray-Ban Wayfarers reportedly increased in sales by nearly two thousand per cent after Cruise wore them in the film.

In 1990, Ebert laid out the formula for a Tom Cruise box-office hit: the movie is about a character who’s boyish and full of potential (“The Color of Money,” “Days of Thunder,” “Cocktail”) and who, with the help of a mentor (played by the likes of Tom Skerritt or Paul Newman), sets out to master a difficult craft (pool hustling, racecar driving, bartending). Often, there is a woman, who is both more mature and taller than Cruise. She either puts him in his place, or helps save the day, usually by saving Cruise himself. “Top Gun” adheres closely to this formula. A few years later, though, he showed his range by appearing in “Born on the Fourth of July,” an antiwar film. The bio-pic is based on the life of Ron Kovic, a peace activist who was paralyzed after serving as a marine sergeant in the Vietnam War. Cruise visited veterans’ hospitals and rode around in a wheelchair to prepare for the role; he also reportedly talked to the director about the possibility of using a chemical drug that would temporarily induce paralysis. The idea was apparently rejected by the movie’s insurance company, for fear that the drug would leave Cruise paralyzed forever.

Several directors have talked about needing to rein Cruise in. Paul Thomas Anderson, when asked if Cruise was “hesitant” about playing a misogynistic dating guru in “Magnolia,” said, “He was sort of the exact opposite. My job in directing Tom was to sometimes calm him down.” Francis Ford Coppola, who directed Cruise in “The Outsiders,” has described the actor’s “willingness to go to extremes.” According to Rob Lowe, one of the film’s stars, Coppola asked the cast to learn gymnastics. “Tom was relentlessly competitive. He ended up being the only one who could do a backflip. It is in the movie ‘The Outsiders’ for no reason.” Needless backflips have become a theme in Cruise’s movies; in “The Firm,” his character—a budding lawyer—encounters a young Black boy who is doing street gymnastics, and joins in, performing a back handspring into a backflip. (The scene is never explained.)