Tom Cruise is soaring to new heights.
The legendary actor appears in a new video from the making of the upcoming “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” that gives fans an “extended behind the scenes look at the biggest stunt in cinema history,” according to Paramount Pictures’ description of the clip on YouTube.
The video, which runs more than nine minutes long, opens with a breathtaking overhead view of a mountain in Hellesylt, Norway, with Cruise explaining that he will ride a motorcycle off of a cliff that turns into a base jump.
“I’ve wanted to do it since I was a little kid,” he says.
Director Christopher McQuarrie says Cruise helped facilitate the stunt by getting together a team of experts in various fields to make sure it goes off without a hitch.
There are clips of Cruise skydiving and riding a motorcycle on a motorcross track built specifically for the stunt, while viewers learn how different models were constructed to properly gauge the angle Cruise would be diving off the bike. There was even a GPS chip to keep track of all of his jumps and gather a wide range of data, including how the wind would affect each jump.
“I have to get so good at this that there’s just no way that I miss my marks,” he says.
“You train and drill every little aspect over and over and over and over again,” he adds while we see clips of him diving and riding his motorcycle.
And Cruise apparently did just that, performing more than 500 dives and 13,000 jumps on the motorcycle.
Around the 7-minute mark, Cruise takes off on the motorcycle, driving off a ramp and then pulling a parachute to the ground below in a mind-blowing effort.
“This is far and away the most dangerous thing we’ve ever attempted,” McQuarrie says.
You can see for yourself how the stunt looks on the big screen when “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” opens in theaters July 2023.