There will be 5 major stunts in Mission Impossible 6. Watch how Tom Cruise did them

A new video released by Paramount Pictures takes us behind-the-scenes of the five biggest action set pieces in Mission Impossible - Fallout - The Long Line, The Downward Spiral, The Motorcycle Chase, The Rooftop Jump and the The Halo Jump. “I don’t think he could’ve beaten the last time,” says Rebecca Ferguson, talking about how Tom Cruise raises the stakes with every new MI film, “but he did.”

The first stunt, The Long Line, involved Cruise jumping onto a rope which was latched onto a moving helicopter. “We could’ve done this with green screen,” says stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood, “but in true Mission Impossible fashion, we flew and we dropped Tom Cruise off of it.”

While shooting the sequence, the crew had the fright of their lives when Cruise appeared to fall off a moving helicopter. Ferguson says that she heard herself scream, while director Christopher McQuarrie recalls that he heard on the radio, “I think we just lost Tom.”

For the second stunt, The Downward Spiral, Cruise actually flew a helicopter and performed a risky 360 degree move that ‘most pilots would not attempt’.

For the Motorcycle Chase in Paris, everyone was tense, because ‘Tom was riding a motorbike without a helmet.’ Cruise recalls that they had a safety rig for one challenging shot, but the rig ‘just wouldn’t work’. So McQuarrie looked at Cruise and asked him what they should do, to which Cruise instantly replied that he would do the shot without the safety rig.

In the infamous Rooftop Chase, Cruise broke his foot while leaping from one building to another. He knew instantly that he’d broken his foot and also knew that they wouldn’t get a chance to do it again, so he pulled himself up and completed the shot. And he was right. Production was suspended for weeks to allow Cruise to recuperate.

The video finishes with the Halo Jump, which stunt coordinator Eastwood points out was the first time an actor actually performed one themselves. “They’re genuinely risking their lives to entertain people,” finishes Simon Pegg, “which is incredibly valiant, and daft.”

Mission: Impossible - Fallout will be released on July 27 and has been receiving unanimously ecstatic reviews.

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