Tom Cruise Held His Breath For Over Six Minutes in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE ROGUE NATION's Uncut Underwater Scene

For years, Tom Cruise has been proving himself as one of the people most willing to give his all in Hollywood. His on-screen running is legendary, and he took things to an extreme level by actually scaling the Burj Khalifa in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, and now he's physically hanging from the outside of a plane in the new Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation. But that isn't his only big stunt in the upcoming action thriller.

A little while back, Cruise and director Chris McQuarrie teased some of the film's action sequences, and Cruise hyped something we haven't seen yet in this franchise:

"We have something I’ve always wanted to do: an underwater sequence without cuts. The kind of training I had to do for that was pretty intense. I’ve done a lot of underwater scenes but I’ve never done one [like this] that will get the audience to lean forward and have a visceral reaction."

Now some details have surfaced about that sequence (via USA Today), and as the headline indicates, Cruise held his breath for a pretty impressive length of time to make the scene happen:

It’s something I have always wanted to do. (Director Christopher McQuarrie) and I have been thinking about it since working on ‘Edge of Tomorrow.’ I have done a lot of underwater sequences. But we wanted to create a suspense underwater sequence without cuts. So doing that sequence was really interesting. We’re underwater and we’re doing breath-holds of 6 to 6 1/2 minutes. So I was doing all my training with the other stuff (on-set). It was very taxing stuff.

I initially thought this sounded crazy, but apparently the world record for breath-holding (without using pure oxygen as an aid) is 11 minutes and 35 seconds, so it's not quite as legendary as it may sound to people like you and me who don't obsessively track that sort of thing. Still, Cruise's six and a half minutes is pretty damn impressive, especially for an A-list actor who is probably an insurance nightmare for the studio.

Meanwhile, a new TV spot for the film has hit the web, so check that out below and watch the movie when it arrives in theaters on July 31st.