PULLING OFF THE SUMMER’S CRAZIEST STUNT
HOWTOM CRUISEPULLED OFF A RECORD-BREAKING FEAT INMISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — THE FINAL RECKONING
Burning man: Tom Cruise executing another history-making stunt
“HOW ARE YOU still alive?”
That, dear readers, is the question that Empire puts to Tom Cruise about Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. Specifically, the film’s most audacious (and Guinness World Record-breaking) stunt, in which Ethan Hunt escapes from a burning plane via parachute, only for that parachute to then burn up, leading to Ethan free-falling through the clouds. Which, by extension, means that Tom Cruise was free-falling through the clouds. And he wanted very much to be in a position to answer questions like, “How are you still alive?” when the stunt was over. “That was a whole story unto itself,” Cruise tells us. “How do we do that? How do I film myself burning a parachute and then recovering?”