After falling in love with flying while filming 1986’s Top Gun, Tom Cruise got his private pilot’s license in 1994. Which means, in typical Tom Cruise fashion, he’s going to do some crazy aerial stunts in Top Gun: Maverick, where he reprises his role as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. That’s apparent in the film’s teaser trailer, where he can be seen flying at a dangerously low altitude (someone add Rey doing a backflip over the jet).
“For the sequence where Tom got to do some extreme low-altitude flying in this film, we had to get special permission from the Navy to do it,” Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski told Entertainment Weekly about how they pulled that shot off. “It was one of the most extreme aerial sequences that we could come up with. Also, getting to do a real launch off a carrier and a real landing on a carrier — no one else has been able to ever do that in a movie before. Tom got to fulfill every kind of aviation dream that he had.”
Now that Tom Cruise has conquered the sky, there’s only one place left for him to go: even further up, into space. C’mon, Mission: Impossible, you gotta get there before Fast and Furious beats you to it (Cruise has said he’s interested). That’s the real Space Race.
Top Gun: Maverick, which also stars Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Ed Harris, and Val Kilmer, opens on June 26.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)
