'Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning' director says viewer 'almost had a heart attack' watching Tom Cruise stunts

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning director Christopher McQuarrie is promising moviegoers they’ll be clutching their chests watching Tom Cruise’s latest stunts in the upcoming action movie.

In a new interview to plug the May release of the eighth instalment in Cruise’s long-running franchise, McQuarrie, 56, revealed that an audience member who got an early look at the film nearly had to be carted off to hospital.

“We had a small screening, and someone said, ‘I was suffocating throughout the entire sequence. I almost had a heart attack.’ And I thought, ‘I guess we did something right,’” McQuarrie told Empire, according to?GamesRadar.

McQuarrie, who said Cruise performed “the most difficult thing” they’ve ever filmed for the series, wouldn’t reveal what the action sequence in question entailed. But in the trailer for The Final Reckoning, Cruise, 62, dangles off the side of a biplane, dives underwater and performs other death-defying stunts.

In an interview with?Empire back in 2022, Cruise declared a scene from Mission: Impossible –?Dead Reckoning Part One, in which he parachuted off of a motorbike as it plunged over a cliff, the scariest stunt he has performed in the more than quarter century he’s been playing IMF agent Ethan Hunt in the series.

“If the wind was too strong, it would blow me off the ramp,”?Cruise said. “The helicopter (filming the scene) was a problem because I didn’t want to be hammering down that ramp at top speed and get hit by a stone. Or if I departed in a weird way, we didn’t know what was going to happen with the bike. I had about six seconds once I departed the ramp to pull the chute and I don’t want to get tangled in the bike. If I do, that’s not going to end well.”

Speaking to Postmedia at the New York City premiere for Dead Reckoning in July 2023, Cruise said that he wanted to tackle that stunt on their first day of filming.

“I trained very hard,” Cruise told Postmedia of taking on something so daunting on the first day of production. “I don’t want that hanging over my head. I trained, so let’s get it done … let’s get it over with.”

“Doing that on the first day was Tom’s idea,” writer-director McQuarrie added. “That motorcycle jump — we spent months rehearsing it and when we got out there on the day, nothing we planned really applied and we had to start from scratch.”

In Dead Reckoning Part One, Cruise also raced through the streets of Rome in a tiny Fiat (while handcuffed to co-star Hayley Atwell), performed a fight scene atop a hurtling train, and speed flew down a mountainside.

McQuarrie and his production team also crashed a full-size train in the film’s gasp-inducing finale.

“The train sequence was probably the most complicated one we’ve ever shot,” he said.

In Dead Reckoning, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his team of spies — which includes Rebecca Ferguson, Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg — goes up against a world-ending artificial intelligence threat known as the Entity and a deadly assassin (Esai Morales) from his past.?

After watching the film, former president Joe Biden was spurred on to try and legislate limits on the use of AI.?

“If he hadn’t already been concerned about what could go wrong with AI before that movie, he saw plenty more to worry about,” said deputy White House chief of staff Bruce Reed, who watched the film with Biden.

Speaking to Postmedia, McQuarrie credited the franchise’s enduring popularity to Cruise’s commitment to finding new ways to thrill moviegoers.

“He’s all about entertaining the audience,” he said.

For his part, Cruise said he hasn’t tired of the series because he and McQuarrie — who has been with the franchise since writing 2010’s?Ghost Protocol?— keep coming up with new ways to challenge his hero.

“There’s constant adventures that we can take this character on,” he said. “To be able to expand it with the cast that we have, McQ and I really wanted to blow this one out and make it a big, big epic adventure. And I get to travel the world. I always wanted to go make movies and travel the world. I wanted to be in other cultures, and not just visit. You get to know people by working with them, and then to be able to celebrate and show people things that we love in different countries and every time there’s always something new. To be able to have something that we can share and make for the big screen I think today it’s important to do that for audiences. That’s what I love doing.”

The eighth?Mission: Impossible film hits theatres on May 23.

mdaniell@postmedia.com