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Tom Cruise has a score to settle. This time, though, he’s not taking on cabals of international terrorists, or acid-spewing aliens, or a rival bartender. With Top Gun: Maverick, he’s been drilling his cast to resist the very laws of physics.

According to Jerry Bruckheimer, who produced both Top Gun: Maverick and the 1986 original, attempts to shoot footage of Cruise, Val Kilmer and the gang in actual fighter planes for the first film were kiboshed by the cast finding the task of acting tricky while pulling 4–5G. 

Cruise was the only member of the cast able to handle the G-forces. “On the first movie,” Bruckheimer said, “we put all the actors in an F-14, and we couldn’t use a frame of it, except for some stuff on Tom – that was it. Their eyes were rolling back into their heads. They were throwing up.” 

So this time around, Cruise took charge. “We were all mini-Toms making this movie,” said Miles Teller, who plays the son of Maverick’s former partner Goose, to Total Film. “[Cruise] put us through… I’ll just call it a ‘Tom Cruise boot camp’. 

“We were getting in killer shape. And also for the stunts and stuff that Tom does in movies, it’s usually a very specific type of training. You’re not just going into the gym and lifting some weights. We did flight training for three months before we started filming… We got put through the wringer.”

The Tom Cruise boot camp is not something to be entered into lightly. “I developed a whole programme for the actors, and how we could get them in the [F/A-18s],” Cruise told Total Film. “It was every step of the way. I had to teach them how to fly. I had to teach them how to handle Gs. [Normal gravity is 1G; acceleration which doubles gravity’s effect on a person’s body is 2G; and so on.] I had to get them confident in the plane.”

“The stakes are incredibly high,” says Teller. “Even if you are not actually flying the fighter jet, you need to be aware of every movement, because if the camera is pointed at you and you are even a millisecond off as far as timing, the whole scene is a bust. That means everything from the motion to the eyeline has to be perfect.”

This, of course, is all very Tom Cruise. After the ‘Cocky Hunk Cruise’ of Risky Business and The Color of Money, and then the ‘Serious Drama Cruise’ of A Few Good Men and Eyes Wide Shut, the third age of Cruise is that of ‘Literal Action Man’ Cruise. 

From Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol in 2011 onwards, the main thrill of a Tom Cruise film is knowing that’s actually Tom Cruise clinging onto the Burj Khalifa, say, or being booted in the face by Henry Cavill in a helicopter that’s about to fall off a cliff. It’s what separates his mega-budget action flicks from all the other mega-budget action flicks. 

He started to become “that guy” to audiences in 1986. He got involved in the original Top Gun because he wanted to have a go in an F-14 fighter jet for real and film it, but found something else when he started interviewing the pilots who were in charge of the machines.  

“They’re very emotional about it,” Cruise said that year. “When you fly in the F-14, it’s one of those experiences that is bigger than life itself. It blows your s— away. These guys do it every day and you know why they want it. Flying is so intense and emotional.”

He found out exactly how intense when he started training with the Blue Angels, the US Navy’s flight stunt squadron, for the film. Cruise had rocked up on a motorbike having just made Legend with Ridley Scott, and was still wearing his long hair in a ponytail.

“They took one look at him and thought, ‘we’re going to give this hippie a ride’,” Bruckheimer told Variety later. “They took him up on an F-14 and flipped him and did all kinds of stunts to turn him around – [to] make sure he never got back in a cockpit.”

Cruise was paired up with a Blue Angels pilot known as Bozo. “For our first flight in the morning, we were going really hard, moving around,” Cruise told Jimmy Kimmel in 2016. “We did 9.5G, very hard on my body. I had a vomit bag right here, so in between takes I leaned down to quickly empty my guts in the bag. The second I did that, he pulls up. My head was literally on the ground from the pressure. I was pressed on the floor, holding my vomit.”

Choking and unable to get his vomit out of his mouth, Cruise begged Bozo to nose down, to no avail. “Finally he released, and we were going straight ahead. I was like, ‘Bozo, what’s the matter with you, man? Didn’t you see my head was on the floor?’ He was like, ‘Well I told you, they don’t call me Bozo for nothing.’” 

Afterwards, Cruise went straight to Chicago to shoot The Color of Money, and bought a pool table for his house, playing frame after frame. He ended up playing all but one of the pool shots in the film himself. Doing things for real has been his way ever since. 

Being run ragged before a scene has been shot is, as Cruise’s past co-stars have attested, par for the course. How I Met Your Mother’s Cobie Smulders was put through her paces before filming Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016). “It was the most physically demanding thing I ever had to do in my life, and I’ve given birth twice,” Smulders told the Huffington Post while promoting the film. She started military training to match the fitness and competence of a major in the US Army, while “just re-learning to walk”, having broken her leg three months before the shoot. All the while, she was trying to keep an eye on her eight-month-old daughter.  

“I trained so hard for that, because it’s really important to me to portray this woman in a realistic way. The real women who decide to enlist to work their way up in the ranks to become a Major in the United States Army are some freakin’ tough broads.”

Similarly, when Rebecca Ferguson flew into Heathrow to start filming Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015), her chauffeur took her not to a hotel or the production offices, but straight to the gym. “From that day on, it was five hours of training, six days a week,” she later recalled to Entertainment Weekly. Fight training, martial arts and pilates were on the menu. “I had to be able to sprint half a mile [with] Tom Cruise,” she said. “It’s very difficult to keep up with him.”

In Rosamund Pike’s recollection, “keeping up” would have been physically impossible. She starred beside Cruise in Jack Reacher (2012), and found herself wondering where he found the energy. “He would shoot all day, maybe get one hour of sleep, then go back to work,” Pike recalled to Us Weekly. “I would get up in the middle of the night to go to the set just to watch him do his sequences.”

Mind-boggling as they sound, Cruise’s hyper-intense boot camps and training regimes have a practical aim too: to fire up the rest of the cast and make sure they’re as committed to the analogue approach as he is. If Cruise can manage to complete a take despite running on a broken ankle – as he did while filming Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018) – then you can probably grit your teeth and get your shots done too.

Take the sky-pe Cruise did for real from 25,000 feet in Mission: Impossible – Fallout. Cruise completed more than 100 ‘high-altitude, low-open’ jumps in the process of filming that sequence, and his co-star Henry Cavill, whose character jumps with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt into the centre of Paris in the film, was keen to get on board with Cruise’s enthusiasm. Cavill kept pressing to be allowed to jump out of a plane and free-fall several thousand feet toward Earth.

“Tom eventually said to me, ‘Look, Henry, I understand what you’re saying. I would love, love, love for you to do it. But if you do, the chances are that you will kill me and everyone else in the process’.” Cavill reluctantly agreed to stand down.

That intensity has occasionally spilled over. In late 2020, a clip surfaced of Cruise chewing out two members of the crew on set for apparent breaches of Covid protocols. “I am beyond your apologies,” he was recorded as saying. “We are not shutting this f—–g movie down. Is it understood? If I see it again, you’re f—–g gone, and so are you… That’s it. Am I clear?”

Yet for many actors, the Cruise boot camp is both a badge of honour and a perk of working with a star and producer who knowingly pushes beyond what most others would be willing to try. “Definitely the most amazing thing I’ve ever done,” said Jay Ellis, who plays Payback, while standing on the tarmac after an F/A-18 flight. “All the training 100 per cent prepared us.”