24. You've heard by now that that's really Cruise hanging onto the side of a plane as it takes off in Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation ("I was joking," McQuarrie quipped to Jeff Goldsmith when Cruise recalled the director suggesting the Airbus 400 scene), but there's a reason why he's doing it in a gray suit.
In not the first time North by Northwest has come up (Bird also said it was very much on his mind shooting the sandstorm scene in Dubai in Ghost Protocol), Cruise purposely donned his dapper flight outfit—"a really well-cut suit," he told Goldsmith—in homage to Cary Grant, who's similarly clad when he outruns a diving crop-duster in the Alfred Hitchcock classic. "We talked about it being a suit," McQuarrie added, "but he shows up...I'm looking at that suit, thinking, 'Where have I seen that suit?!'"
(A windblown Cruise atop the train in the original is also very reminiscent of Grant's headlong run toward the camera. As for the assassination attempt scene at the opera in Rogue Nation, McQuarrie swears he had not seen The Man Who Knew Too Much before filming that sequence, so now he proudly looks at it as an accidental tribute to Hitch.)
Meanwhile, Cruise, who is an aerobatic pilot in real life, also wore specially designed contact lenses to protect his eyes from any debris in the air. But as for the exhaust coming out of the engine, "that took awhile to get out of my system," he said.
25. "Why do the stunts look real?" the Rogue Nation production posed the question in a 2015 featurette. "Because they are real."
As cinematographer Robert Elswit told The Hollywood Reporter, "There's no digital Tom, and there's no fake plane. He's really strapped to an Airbus."
Not that it doesn't take a village to pull it all off, lately overseen by stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood, who's been with the franchise since Rogue Nation. Visual effects supervisor David Vickery, who makes sure there are no traces of the harness or the many wires and cables involved when Cruise is strapped onto things, noted that they did eight takes with the plane.
But Cruise used to share the burden a bit more. For instance, that was really him (on wires) scaling Utah's Dead Horse Point at the beginning of M:I 2, but he had a climbing double, Ron Kauk, and Keith Campbell, his stunt double for the first two films, did the slip off the overhang.
"[Ron] and Tom got to be quite good friends during the week of shooting," Campbell recalled to UK Climbing in 2000. "Tom has a strong interest in climbing and is really fun to work with: tough, athletic, coordinated and aggressive. Ron worked with him to get him comfortable on the rock and so far off the deck—we were working at the top of the cliff, which is about 600 feet to the talus slope and another 2,000 feet to the river."
Cruise indeed take to climbing, and in 2018's Fallout that's just him saving the day on Norway's Preikestolen, 2,000 feet above a rushing fjord. The shoot lasted three days and supplies had to be flown up by helicopter, "but there are no stunt doubles in any of those shots," McQuarrie told USA Today.