A ‘Mission: Impossible’ Star Would ‘Love To Go Into Space’ With Tom Cruise

The next time a boomer tells you about how great things “used” to be, bring up the Space Race. No, not the one between the United States and the Soviet Union. I’m talking about the race between which movie series will shoot in space first: Fast and Furious or Mission: Impossible. That’s way more interesting than Apollo 11, or whatever.

When we asked Chris Morgan, who’s written every Fast movie since Tokyo Drift, if we’ll ever see Vin Diesel throw a moon rock at Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (the quip writes itself), he answered, “Look, I get all versions of that question. I get, ‘Are you going to space’ and ‘Please, God, tell me you’re not going to space because you’ll lose me if you do.’ The only way I’d go to space is if I had something so good.” Meanwhile, Tom Cruise is already shooting a movie set in space with Elon Musk, the Rick to Kanye West’s Morty, and he’s “thought about” leaving this cursed Earth for a future M:I installment. “It’s the mechanics of getting it there,” he added. “How do you build a sequence [up] there and how long can we have that sequence Because if I went up and just dropped, how do you put that into the structure of a screenplay of a mission” Good questions, ones that Cruise’s M:I co-star, Simon Pegg, hopes will get answered.

“I’d love to go into space, it would be amazing! But you have to also think about your family and safety and stuff,” the Shaun of the Dead star told NME with a laugh. “Tom never does anything recklessly and all of his stunts are meticulously designed, rehearsed, and trained for. If he does it, it will be really safe… You never know.”

It’s not a bad idea: space might currently be a safer filming location than a soundstage.