It is often hard to believe that Tom Cruise was born in 1962. The Hollywood star is fitter and lighter on his toes than his contemporaries and younger actors, and he proves it by kicking, punching, running, leaping and generally putting stunt doubles out of work. Cruise sweats bucketloads to justify every cent of the many millions that are paid to him in all his movies, and he performs many of his stunts himself.
Cruise’s latest movie, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, features several fight sequences, including hand-to-hand combat. The actor’s face has weathered, but as repeated bare-chested shots in his films prove, his days in the gym are well spent.
Cruise’s well-publicised penchant for daredevil stunts scaled new eights in Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol (2011). Cruise fired his insurance agent so that he could dangle in peace from the side of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, in Ghost Protocol.
In the next Mission: Impossible film, Rogue Nation (2015), Cruise did one better. “As a kid I remember flying on an airplane and thinking: ‘what would it be like out on the wing or on the side of the airplane?’” he said in an interview. So when he hangs from the door of an Airbus plane during its take-off, it is no big deal at all, just a childhood dream come true.
Cruise’s reinvention as an action hero began in Days of Thunder (1990), in which he plays a racing car driver. He reportedly wasn’t allowed to race the cars himself because of insurance reasons. Cruise became the go-to actor for neo-Bond espionage thrillers featuring bone-crunching fights and gravity-defying car crashes with Mission: Impossible (1996). In Mission: Impossible II (2000), Cruise did his own rock climbing stunts in the opening sequence until the point where his character, Ethan Hunt, flies off the cliff. He is also handy behind the wheels.
Does Cruise get his high energy levels from running? Here is a fabulous 18-minute compilation of every single time Cruise ran in his movies till date. The mashup includes moments from the movies Cruise made before his action phase. We can expect the video to be updated when The Mummy, a reboot of the franchise starring Cruise, will be released in 2017.