The behind-the-scenes footage from Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning is just the latest display of the actor’s affinity for death-defying stunts

It hasn’t been long since Tom Cruise pushed the limits of flight in Top Gun: Maverick, but as the first glimpses of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning proves, the stunt-obsessed star continues to teeter on the precipice of death in the name of spectacle. Cruise’s sequences of increasing danger would make most people’s hearts drop, but it’s just another day on the job for the veteran. Like a true daredevil, he seems to revel in the face of peril, all with a pearly-white smile on his face. So how does he do it? It comes with a lot of time, preparation, and maybe an inherited gene that prevents you from feeling fear. Cruise’s storied history of audacious stunt work proves it.

Hanging off a biplane in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning

Cruise took a little break from filming the latest entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise to deliver a PSA about, what else, the importance of seeing movies in the cinema. In the footage taken for CinemaCon, the actor casually sits on the body of a bi-plane flying over the canyons of South Africa. By the end of the clip, he stands up before the plane dives away, tilting a whole 90 degrees with Cruise still strapped in. Is he okay? Did he just bend the laws of physics? Maybe after you’ve gripped onto the outside of a cargo jet (more on that below), a stunt like this is relatively easy. In any case, his insurance must be wild.

Flying in fighter jets in Top Gun: Maverick

Okay, so Cruise nor the entire cast of rookie pilots actually flew the planes we see in the legacy sequel, but they experienced the next best thing in the passenger seat. During the first Top Gun movie, he threw up in his oxygen mask the first time he experienced the brutal forces of extreme flight. Nevertheless, he persisted. According to the movie’s aerial stunt coordinator Kevin LaRosa II, the cast went through a three-month boot camp to mitigate the effects of air sickness, building up from smaller planes to F-18s. Like Maverick himself, Cruise took the driver’s seat behind the scenes, as the training process was “built in and heavily driven” by him.

Hanging off a plane in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation

Sensing a theme here? Cruise loves to take flight in and out of the passenger seat, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the infamous plane stunt, in which Ethan Hunt hangs on for dear life to the side of Airbus 400 as it takes off. Cruise endured speeds of over a hundred knots and 1,000 feet in height for real — visual effects were only used to scrub out the wires keeping him in place.

Cruise’s antics stunned not only audiences but the flabbergasted crew. “When he wants to do something, he’ll figure out a way to do it,” director of photography Robert Elswit told The Hollywood Reporter. “He’s the most obsessive artist. … If it couldn’t actually be Tom on the plane, I think he wouldn’t want the sequence in the movie. What inside of him makes it possible for anybody to do that kind of shit — and not be scared shitless? He loves it.”

Zero gravity flight in The Mummy

Our dearly departed Dark Universe never got off the ground thanks to this reviled flop — but what it did give us was Cruise and his co-star Annabelle Wallis getting tossed around like ragdolls in a nosediving plane. Cruise wouldn’t accept a green screen moment if he was strapped to a chair and forced into it like he’s in A Clockwork Orange, so he opted instead to shoot 64 takes of the plane crash sequence in zero gravity. Filmed over the course of four flights in two days, the poor crew were upchucking their lunches constantly while Cruise held down the fort.

To his credit, this one actually looks kind of fun — and it’s accessible enough if you have, ahem… £6,000 laying around. Adventurous mortals like us can experience five minutes of weightlessness thanks to zero-G flight operators.

Climbing the Burj Khalifa in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

Who can forget when Tom Cruise made everyone question whether he was of sound mind when he climbed the tallest building in the world? Ethan Hunt took the long way to acquire some nuclear codes by scaling 130 floors of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. It was all made possible with a harness so tight it cut off his circulation and a training simulation that even matched the temperature of the building’s glass. For a skyscraper so high it can rise above the clouds, Cruise did his best Spider-Man impersonation and made it look easy.