Tom Cruise Hypes TOP GUN: MAVERICK Death-Defying Aerial Sequences, Says "No One's Ever Done This Before"

While speaking with Empire, for their May issue, the film's 3x Academy Award-nominated superstar Tom Cruise explained what convinced him to finally sign on for the long-rumored sequel, which will reunite him with original Top Gun producer Jerry Bruckheimer. He says, “We just started talking, and I realised that there were things that we could accomplish cinematically. And I started getting excited about this big challenge of, ‘How do we do it?’ So I said to Jerry, ‘I’ll do it if…’ meaning, I’m not going to do the CGI stuff.”

However, unlike the original Top Gun, the action this time around is all real as the actors got behind the cockpits (with trained fighter pilots, of course) and actually experienced all of the g-force heavy action sequences firsthand. “What’s different about this movie is that [in Top Gun] we put the actors in the F-14s and we couldn’t use one frame of it, except some stuff on Tom, because they all threw up. It’s hysterical to see their eyes roll back in their heads. So everything was done on a gimbal. But in this movie, Tom wanted to make sure the actors could actually be in the F-18s.” says Bruckheimer as he reminisces on the experience of filming the 1986 classic. 

Cruise, who's already gone above and beyond with the death-defying stunts for his Mission: Impossible franchise, made sure Paramount knew exactly what to expect with the level of practical thrills he hoped to achieve with this film before the shoot began. Cruise tells the trade with a laugh, “I said to the studio, ‘You don’t know how hard this movie’s going to be. No-one’s ever done this before,’ There’s never been an aerial sequence shot this way. I don’t know if there ever will be again, to be honest.”

After more than thirty years of service as one of the Navy’s top aviators, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is where he belongs, pushing the envelope as a courageous test pilot and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him. When he finds himself training a detachment of Top Gun graduates for a specialized mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen, Maverick encounters Lt. Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), call sign: “Rooster,” the son of Maverick’s late friend and Radar Intercept Officer Lt. Nick Bradshaw, aka “Goose.”

Facing an uncertain future and confronting the ghosts of his past, Maverick is drawn into a confrontation with his own deepest fears, culminating in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those who will be chosen to fly it.