As Hollywood’s resident overachiever, Tom Cruise has done so many of his own stunts that people were forced to create an AI image of him standing shoulder-to-shoulder with stunt doubles earlier this year. As his action career took off, the wild sequences got more intense, and in his tenure as Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible, Cruise has climbed the Burj Khalifa, leapt from buildings, clung to the side of a plane and generally just put himself in harm’s way.

Despite having stunt coordinators on call to choreograph his largely unnecessary feats, sometimes they’ve gone terribly wrong. When the Mission Impossible franchise kicked off with the first 1996 film, it earned immense praise for an action scene in which Cruise’s character blows up an aquarium as part of a getaway.

As a wall of water exploded through the glass wall of a restaurant when they filmed, it became immediately apparent nobody could accurately guess where the broken glass would end up.

The speed of the water meant Cruise was forced to jump over another person in order to get to a place of reasonable safety, fearing that a rogue shard might just wind up in his neck. Luckily, the actor only sustained a nasty ankle injury. A fellow stuntman wasn’t so fortunate, however, and endured a massive gash in his leg. It wouldn’t be his last Mission Impossible leg injury, either.

Fast forward to 2017, and Cruise is filming the sixth movie in the series, Mission: Impossible – Fallout. He’d set himself the unenviable task of jumping from the edge of one building to another, the obvious ramifications being a miscalculated splat into the nearest hard surface. While he was attached to wires, they didn’t account for his ankles, one of which he proceeded to snap.

Dragging around a broken ankle like a badge of honour, he soldiered on with the scene. “I knew instantly it was broken, and I ran past the camera,” he recalled. “Got the shot – it’s in the movie.” Getting the shot seems to come above all for Cruise, whether it means hanging off the wing of a plane or riding a motorbike off a cliff. It seems that as long as the action sequences are captured on film, he’s happy to risk his life.

Sometimes, though, the situation was out of his hands. As Emily Blunt, his Edge of Tomorrow co-star, made clear when she recalled a driving scene the pair had shot. Recalling the near-death incident on Conan O’Brien’s talk show, she said: “I hear him [Cruise] under his breath as I approach the right-hand turn, going ‘Brake, brake, brake. Brake. Brake, brake, brake… Oh, God. Brake, brake, brake. Brake it hard! Brake hard!’ I left it too late, and so drove us into a tree,” she laughed. “I almost ????????????????ed Tom Cruise.”