No article about actor Tom Cruise would be complete without a mention of the fact that the Mission: Impossible star does more of his own stunts than most any other leading man in Hollywood, from scaling the outside of the Burj Khalifa to suspending a knife less than an inch away from his eyeball. And for his main franchise’s fifth installment, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Cruise admits that old habits die hard – for the new film, the actor says he pulled off a dangerous underwater stunt that had him holding his breath for an agonizing six-and-a-half minutes.
Speaking with USA Today, Cruise explained that he wanted to execute another risky stunt for the espionage fivequel, seeing as fans have come to expect daredevil endeavors from the series. Specifically, the actor had his heart set on doing an underwater sequence with no cuts:
“It’s something I have always wanted to do. [Director Christopher McQuarrie] and I have been thinking about it since working on ‘Edge of Tomorrow.’ I have done a lot of underwater sequences. But we wanted to create a suspenseful underwater sequence without cuts. So doing that sequence was really interesting. We’re underwater and we’re doing breath-holds of 6 to 6 1/2 minutes. So I was doing all my training with the other stuff (on-set). It was very taxing stuff.”
The world record for time spent holding one’s breath underwater is 22 minutes and 22 seconds, but six minutes is still an uncomfortably long time for anyone to spend without ready access to oxygen, and it’s always impressive to hear about how seriously Cruise takes doing his own stunts on movies like Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. With these movies getting bigger and ballsier, one has to wonder whether the actor will ever find a stunt so crazily insane that he’ll back down from it, but that day appears to be a while off yet.
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation opens July 31.