Simon Pegg recalls insane behaviour from Tom Cruise before stunt in ‘Mission: Impossible’

Simon Pegg sat down for an interview for a new issue of People where he opened up about some of Tom Cruise’s most challenging stunts in the Mission: Impossible franchise.

Cruise will “literally will risk his life for the audience,” according to his friend.

“I've said, ‘You're absolutely nuts’ many times to him,” he added. “But he just cares that much about it.”

“I've been there for a lot of them,” Pegg remarked about his stunts.

In the 2011 flick, Ghost Protocol, Cruise scales the outside of the world’s tallest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, and Pegg remembers seeing him “just leaning out of the window and seeing Tom sort of hanging there, smiling, this big s*** eating grin on his face, like, ‘I'm having the best time.’”

His personal favorite is when Cruise leaped off a cliff on his motorcycle in 2023’s Dead Reckoning Part One, “It was nail-biting, because we'd literally see [Cruise] just disappear, and then we'd have to wait to hear ‘good canopy’ [meaning his parachute opened safely] on the radio. And so it was a kind of breath-hold moment.”

One stunt that Pegg thought was “interesting” took place at the start of 2015’s Rogue Nation where Cruise has to hang on the outside of a military plane as it takes off, “That was the first time I'd seen him nervous. There were a lot of variables involved in that stunt ... a lot of things that could have gone wrong. Everything is managed to the micro detail. You know, the stunt team is amazing. Tom is obviously incredibly dedicated to making sure he's ready.”

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is set to hit theaters on May 23.

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