Cruise got stuck on wing of biplane filming Mission: Impossible sequel

Tom Cruise got stuck on the wing of a biplane shortly before it ran out of fuel during the filming of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, the director of the eighth installment of the action franchise revealed at the Cannes film festival yesterday.

- Philip Oltermann

Speaking to an audience hours before the film's premiere, Christopher McQuarrie recounted the filming of a stunt sequence in which Cruise, in his long-running role as the field agent Ethan Hunt, walked between the two wings of a biplane as the aircraft was mid-air over South Africa.

Cruise, who at 62 continues to insist on performing his own stunts, had himself come up with the action sequence where he would float "zero-G" between the wings of the plane and dismissed the initial warnings of professional wing-walking stuntmen, said McQuarrie, who has directed the actor in the last four Mission: Impossible films as well as the first of the Jack Reacher action films.

The director, who was overseeing the stunt from a helicopter flying alongside, explained that wing-walking was extremely risky because the human body would start to break down after about 12 minutes because of the impact of wind at extreme speed and the difficulty of breathing in dispersed molecules.