Tom Cruise Filmed That Wild Motorcycle Cliff Jump On The Very First Day Of Shooting ‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’

As the seventh Mission: Impossible film (now known as Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One) traipsed around Europe as it bounced from country to country looking for safe harbors to film during the pandemic, rumors began spreading of Tom Cruise doing what he does best: Jumping off insanely high objects.

This time around, the actor had reportedly launched a motorcycle off of a cliff, and sure enough, the trailer for Dead Reckoning Part One featured the insane stunt. There was no denying that was Cruise literally flying through the air. It’s exactly the kind of stunt that Cruise is known for, and according to a new report, it was the first scene he filmed for the movie.

“Doing that on Day One gave us all the time in the world to understand why he [Ethan Hunt] was doing what he was doing,” director Christopher McQuarrie told Empire. “If we sat around and tried to figure out these movies the old-fashioned way, you’d never find it, simply because it’s such a living, breathing thing.”

As for Cruise, well, he wasn’t about to let a global outbreak stop him from hurling his body from a cliff at breakneck speed.

“It’s never the easy road,” Cruise said. “I have a responsibility to audiences, the studio, my crew, my cast and the industry. We can’t compromise just because all of these things happened. I can’t compromise the storytelling.”

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One jumps into theaters on July 12.