Tom Cruise may have been applauded for saving Hollywood amid the pandemic, but the “Mission: Impossible” actor has remained grounded, according to his “Dead Reckoning” co-star Simon Pegg.
“My relationship with him is very simple and amiable,” Pegg said during BBC Radio 4’s “Desert Island Discs” (via People magazine) of working with Cruise for nearly two decades. “It has always been a very easy relationship. I think you realize that when you meet the person rather than the thicket of mythology that has built up around them, it’s a different experience.
Pegg added of Cruise, “I mean, he loves (fame) and he really appreciates it — that’s all he knows. She excites and pushes him. He sort of appreciates the ridiculousness of it at times.
The “Shaun of the Dead” actor previously joked that Cruise “maintains his authority by never being guilty of anything” and is well liked on set.
“I’ll bring things up to him and I can be frank with him,” Pegg said. “But it’s still Tom Cruise. When you’re on set, he’s the boss.”
Pegg continued: “People have these opinions about him, which are based entirely on gossip, and he really doesn’t do anything to fight it. When I hear people speculating about his strange religion and making assumptions about who he is as a person, I say, ‘You know he’s risking his life for his audience?’”
Pegg applauded Cruise’s dedication to the lack of stunt doubles, saying, “There’s a thrill you get when there’s authenticity: the idea that this guy is actually jumping off a cliff on a motorcycle and deploying his parachute at 100 feet from the ground? He creeps you out.
Cruise famously performs his own stunts, including flying military planes for “Top Gun: Maverick” and defying death (and gravity) atop a motorcycle for the upcoming film “Dead Reckoning.” The next installment also “destroys” a 70-ton train, according to director Christopher McQuarrie’s vision.
“At the beginning of this movie, I said to Tom, ‘What do you want to do?'” shared McQuarrie. “He said, ‘I want to ride a motorcycle off a cliff. What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘I want to destroy a train.’ We’re big fans of Buster Keaton, John Frankenheimer, David Lean, all these filmmakers who had a fabulous train wreck at one time or another. I thought, “I earned it, I want to destroy one too.” I think the energy that went into developing it, designing it, building it and then making a sequence to justify its existence was probably the biggest challenge of my entire life.
