Tom Cruise Faced Real Torpedoes and a Risky Trap in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING
Tom Cruise has made a career out of redefining what’s physically possible for an action star, but Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning might’ve delivered his most intense brush with danger yet, and yes, it involved actual torpedoes.
In a recent episode of The Empire Film Podcast, stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood broke down the grueling submarine sequence from the film, which I’ve already seen three times, where Cruise’s Ethan Hunt navigates through the wreckage of the Sevastopol to retrieve the Entity’s source code, and in true Cruise fashion, the production team didn’t fake it. Eastwood said:
“The easiest thing in the world to do would have been to have Tom swim through and react to CG torpedoes. That would have been the way. But then you get CG bubble trails and you've got to match plate shots.
“You've done this whole amazing sequence [for] real, and suddenly you're swimming through and some of the audience are like, 'Nah, we can see that's CG. I'm disconnected.’”
That disconnection is exactly what Cruise wanted to avoid. He’s not just performing these stunts for spectacle, he’s doing it to keep the audience locked into the experience. As Eastwood put it:
“Tom does not want an audience disconnected. He doesn't want them to be cheated… He just wants to do it for real as much as he can. As an actor, he wants to react to these things, you know?”
Director Christopher McQuarrie pushed things even further, asking Eastwood to increase the number of torpedoes in the scene. They landed on five. Each one was heavily tested, because as Eastwood made clear:
“If it’s uncontrolled, we’re not doing it.”
Still, no amount of control guarantees zero danger, and Cruise learned that firsthand.
“He got trapped once. It wasn't bad, because Tom can hold his breath for a long time. Before he had even finished being trapped, I was already pulling the thing off him.”
It's just another reminder, when you buy a ticket to a Tom Cruise movie,. you're not just signing up for a movie. You're signing up for the closest thing to live-action death-defying theater. Cruise wants to do it all for real, he’s in it, body and soul… and apparently, with torpedoes.