Is Tom Cruise the Last Action Hero?
After a strange, controversial career, he has become one of the few figures who upholds the old rules of Hollywood—where the human body is the greatest special effect.
Tom Cruise holds the Guinness World Records title for “most burning parachute jumps by an individual.” The dubious institution awarded this honor to the Hollywood icon not long after the release of Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, the eighth entry in the popular action franchise. The film features Cruise’s superspy character Ethan Hunt escaping from a biplane via a parachute that catches fire in midair. Cruise actually jumped from a helicopter 7,500 feet above the ground while strapped to a chute presoaked in fuel and lit ablaze. He had roughly three seconds to cut away from the burning parachute and deploy a backup. He performed this stunt 16 separate times.
Cruise’s commitment to death-defying authenticity has become an intractable part of his contemporary public image. Since 2010, following a decade of tabloid scandal, Cruise has successfully rebranded himself as a consummate action star who performs all of his own stunts, a persona that blurs on- and off-screen. If his character has to evade bad guys in a high-speed car chase or grab onto an airplane as it takes off (or, really, anything to do with jumping out of or onto planes), chances are it’s actually Tom doing the work.