Top Gun: Maverick star recalls a time when he believed Tom Cruise had killed him

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Glen Powell remembers how Tom Cruise nearly killed him during reshoots for Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick in London. After more than three decades, Paramount released a sequel to the cult favorite Top Gun movie. The movie included a few new elite pilots, notably Rooster Bradshaw, the son of Goose Bradshaw, played by Miles Teller, and Powell’s Hangman, however, it mostly centered on Cruise’s Maverick and his personal story. Cruise and the cast discovered methods to unwind during their breaks while filming the movie.

When Powell was doing additional filming for Top Gun: Maverick, he decided to go skydiving in London. Jonathan Majors, who plays Kang the Conqueror on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, revealed that Cruise organized his skydiving adventure and requested that he jump alone. The actor was promoting his new movie, Devotion. Powell did, but on the way down he ran into specific problems that Powell felt would kill him. Here is his complete account:

That was actually the second date with my girlfriend… We were gonna go do some reshoots in London. I say ‘I wanna go skydiving while I’m at here’ and he says “The skydiving here is great.” Sends a helicopter for me but it got so windy that the skydiving team, I was with the UK skydiving team, they said it’s so dangerous we should not go skydiving. I said ‘Alright, I’m no hero.’ So we scrapped it and went back and then Tom hit me up a couple of weeks later he said ‘Hey man, what are you scared?’ You never took me up on skydiving. So, with the girl that I was seeing at that time, it was our second date, we went skydiving and when I got there, I found out that Tom’s only request was that Glen cannot go skydiving with another person. He has to go solo the first time. So I literally have to jump out of this plane by myself, but the worst part is that I couldn’t find my tab when I was falling. My first thought was like ‘Oh Tom just killed me, he’s gonna feel so bad.’ I’m looking for the tab and I went ‘You’re not Tom Cruise, you’ll never be Tom Cruise why did you do this?’ And then I finally pulled out, I was way below, came in hot, made it.

Top Gun: Maverick star recalls a time when he believed Tom Cruise had killed him 2

Cruise’s dedication to daring stunts distinguishes him as a unique movie star

It is well known that Cruise went to great pains to ensure that Top Gun: Maverick accurately depicted the excitement of naval flying. The movie employed hardly any CGI, and all of the main actors—including the inexperienced pilots—underwent real training to become proficient in their particular planes. Powell contacted his A-list co-star for his own skydiving trip because it made plausible that Cruise’s adventurous antics had somehow rubbed off on him. Unfortunately, he had no idea that Cruise would make it more difficult for him by making him do it alone.

Before Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise had already established a reputation for performing his own stunts. He still pushes the envelope in the Mission: Impossible series, which he also oversees. In the course of the action-adventure series, the actor has scaled Dubai’s Burj Kalifa, clung to the side of an Airbus 400 as it was traveling at top speed in Rogue Nation, skydived, and hung from a helicopter. When Powell was also skydiving in London, he might have been considering the last one.

If Cruise and Powell will work together again in the Top Gun series is unknown. Top Gun 3 has undoubtedly generated interest, but Paramount hasn’t yet given the project an official order. However, it will be intriguing to watch the two interact further if the threequel is eventually released, especially after Top Gun: Maverick revealed that Hangman is Maverick’s true heir.

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