‘He has no fear': my life jumping out of planes with Tom Cruise

Times

6 days ago

When Tom Cruise called to offer him a job on Mission: Impossible, Wade Eastwood was strapped into a car and ready to make a 30-metre jump.
People were waiting for the stuntman on the set of a car advert, but he took a quick break for Cruise.
'The call came and I saw it was him, so I quickly took my helmet off and said 'Give me two minutes',' Eastwood recalls. 'And he was like, 'Please can you come and join me on Mission?' '
That was ten years ago. Eastwood and Cruise have since worked together on four Mission: Impossible films — starting with the fifth instalment, Rogue Nation — as well as The Mummy and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.
The pair first met in 2013 on the set of the Doug Liman film Edge of Tomorrow and instantly hit it off. 'We basically met in the car park of the studio and found out immediately that we had very similar energy,' says Eastwood, 53. 'I'm not one to go on holiday and lie by the pool. I've got to do some extreme sports. And he's exactly the same.' Cruise is now a close friend, and they occasionally go skydiving together during their time off.
As stunt co-ordinator and second unit director, Eastwood is in charge of all action sequences in the latest (and final) Mission: Impossible film, The Final Reckoning, which was released last week. And, as anyone who has ever watched one of the eight instalments knows, there is a lot of action: car chases pile onto plane crashes and submarine explosions.
In The Final Reckoning, artificial intelligence is the super-villain. But Cruise is defying AI, as well as CGI and indeed age, in real life too: at 62, he is still doing his own stunts.
'Tom just doesn't want the audience to be cheated,' Eastwood says. 'We don't use green screens, everything is real. And the audience can feel it.'
So what's it like co-ordinating stunts for a famously demanding megastar? In the previous film, 2023's Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, Cruise trained for over a year in motocross and skydiving, which involved doing more than 500 skydives and 13,000 motocross jumps.
No matter how many months of preparation and training there are, however, these stunts come with a very real danger of injury or even death. It is Eastwood's job to make them as safe as possible, but, as he admits, 'anything can happen'.
The stuntman say he has yet to see Cruise get cold feet: the only time the actor ever backs out of a stunt is when it doesn't suit the story.
'Tom doesn't show fear, Tom shows competence,' he says. 'He had fun during all his stunts, even when it was exhausting. He's always positive, he'll always put on a smile, and he genuinely enjoys it.'
Cruise was 34 when he starred in the first Mission: Impossible film. He recently told The Hollywood Reporter that he wanted to keep making action films 'into my hundreds' — but surely there are some stunts he can't do any more?
'No, no chance. He's a machine,' Eastwood insists. 'He acts like a 20-year-old. And there's no magic there, it's just hard work and discipline with his food, nutrition and training.' Cruise sticks to a strict workout routine in his gym, which travels with him to every film set. He calls it 'the pain cave' and a sign outside it reads: 'Only the motivated may enter.'
In one scene of The Final Reckoning, Cruise walks on the wing of a small plane as it flies.
'The audience will never really appreciate how dangerous that plane chase is,' Eastwood says. 'I have to do what I can to eliminate as much risk as possible, but there is still a lot of risk.'
Not only was it dangerous, but physically intense. 'It beat the hell out of him,' Eastwood says. 'The wind hitting him, and the blast of the propeller, particles hitting him. It was the hardest workout you could ever do, it was very dangerous and very exhausting for him. Many times we were carrying him off the wing because he was so tired. And he was flying all day.'
Another standout stunt in the film is an underwater scene in which Cruise's character is infiltrating a submarine. Cruise wasn't able to see much because of the reflection of the lights, and his diving suit weighed more than 125 pounds.
'It was absolutely hectic and chaotic underwater,' Eastwood says. 'We rehearsed as much as we could, but it's like having an animal on set: they always react slightly differently, no matter how much you rehearse, and filming underwater was the same.'
One of Eastwood's favourite stunts was Cruise's basejump off a cliff in Norway on a motorbike, for Dead Reckoning. 'When Tom rode past me and disappeared off the ramp … that was a moment I'll never forget in my 33 years in the film industry,' Eastwood says. 'Because all that work, all that training, all the prep, all the exhaustion, for everyone to come together to create this piece of cinematic history, and it goes perfectly — it's an amazing feeling.'
He celebrated that stunt with some rare quiet time.
Eastwood's favourite memory from the latest movie was filming in his native South Africa and being able to show Cruise and the rest of the crew his home. 'Tom saw my home town, Durban, where I grew up. It was very special,' he says. For a bit of light R&R, the pair jumped out of a helicopter together in Jeffreys Bay.
But the real pinch-me moment came when it was time to go home from the set each night. Cruise and Eastwood would fly separate aircraft alongside each other back to the runway, Top Gun style. 'I'd just look across and smile and wave, and it's like, we're flying in my home-town mountains, where I grew up as a kid. Tom Cruise is in a biplane 10ft away from me, and we are going home as the sun's setting,' Eastwood says. 'It's surreal. It makes all the stress and the pressure more than worthwhile.'