Tom Cruise risks his life hanging off a plane — and other unbelievable ‘Mission: Impossible’ stunts

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he told USA Today. “It’s very taxing stuff.”At 2,722 feet tall, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, is the tallest structure in the world.Child’s play for Cruise.In an eight-minute sequence in 2011’s “Ghost Protocol,” the actor slowly ascends the outside of the actual building, hanging only from a wire, and then terrifyingly plummets down.“Somebody said, ‘What if the cable breaks?’ ” stunt coordinator Gregg Smrz told Yahoo Entertainment. “And I said, ‘That’s not an option.’ We actually did the math, and there was enough time of free fall for him to text me on the way down, and for me to receive it!”An iconic moment of “The Spy Who Loved Me” shows super spy James Bond skiing off a cliff and opening a Union Jack parachute.

But it was a stuntman — not actor Roger Moore — taking his life in his own hands.Well, Cruise one-upped 007 by driving a motorcycle himself off a mountainside and then parachuting down to Earth in 2023’s “Dead Reckoning Part One.”More than that, he performed the incredible maneuver on the first day of filming. “Well, we know either we will continue with the film or we’re not.

Let’s know day one!” Cruise told Entertainment Tonight. “Let us know day one what is going to happen: Do we all continue or is it a major rewrite?”“Dead Reckoning” was hardly Cruise’s first cliff.Twenty-three years earlier in “Mission: Impossible II,” the actor gave audiences a taste of the badassery to come when he climbed a rock ledge with his bare hands — supported, as usual, by just a cable.“I was really mad that he wanted to do it, but I tried to stop him and I couldn’t,” director John Woo told Entertainment Weekly. “I was so scared I was sweating.