Mission: Impossible - Fallout: The Curious Charm and Mysterious Durability of Tom Cruise

Still Standing: Producer and Actor Tom Cruise, who plays "Ethan Hunt" in Mission: Impossible Fallout, talks to reporters on the red carpet of the U.S. premiere at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, July 22, 2018. (Photo by Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Both the raging 26-year success of the Mission Impossible franchise and the success of its producer/lead actor/chief stuntman, Tom Cruise are a direct result of the intense, scholarly attention that Cruise and his directors – in this instance, the talented Christopher McQuarrie – bring to the stunts. Thrice married, often seeming a bit infatuated with himself in unscripted appearances, and vilified for his long association with Scientology, the extremely fit, driven, now middle-aged Mr. Cruise turns out to be as bulletproof as his character in the Mission Impossible series when it comes to box office time.

Fallout is no exception, with the film popping off to fine start, both critically and commercially. As for the trademark Mission: Impossible stunts, or more accurately, for the unending one-of-a-kind hyper-athletic sequences in which the actor literally defies death, Cruise's director McQuarrie notes wryly that he doesn't much worry (any more) about the actual stunts so much as he worries about something happening to Cruise "crossing a street" in a moment that has not been rehearsed quite as obsessively or thoroughly as the more dangerous stunts have been.

It's a telling, if more than slightly tongue-in-cheek observation, and also patently untrue in the sense that -- especially in the heavily rehearsed stunts -- there was plenty for Cruise and McQuarrie to worry about. Which they successfully did. In Fallout, the sixth installment of the franchise, Cruise notably rides a motorcycle at speed against oncoming (stunt-driven) traffic, ascends to a hovering helicopter by rope, flies a helicopter within inches of rock faces in New Zealand, and not least, bails out of a plane at 25,000 feet. Among other tricks.

Yes, the rooftop chase sequence filmed a few months back in London, in which he actually broke his ankle while making a running jump from one rooftop to the next, has been pointedly kept by Cruise and McQuarrie in the movie.

"Back in the Pleistocene, at military school in the South, some of my dorm-mates and I started a mimeographed – remember mimeographs? – broadside called the Trusty Tribunal. We were pamphleteers in the 18th-century sense, with approximately the same tech, but at a military .

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Thanks to : Forbes Article