Tom Cruise was born on July 2, 1962, and has been a prolific actor ever since his first role in “Endless Love” (1981), though his breakout role would come two years later in “Risky Business” (1983).

Many people have also critiqued his attractiveness like PHS junior Salem Brown.

“[Tom Cruise] is attractive and I’ve always thought so, that is until I discovered he was 5’ 7”,” Brown said. “In a game of smash or pass I guess he could be considered a smash.”

After years of film-making, Cruise has proven to push himself time and time again to bring larger-than-life stunts to audiences across the world.

Among his most outrageous stunts, the Mission: Impossible [M:I] franchise has held the crown to many ever since the original film released in 1996. Though not known by many, Cruise’s M:I franchise is actually based on a TV series from 1966, but the most famous stunts have come out of the recent films.

Over the course of his career,  Cruise has climbed on the side of the world’s largest building [the Burj Khalifa in Dubai] in “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” [2011], learned to fly a plane in “Top Gun: Maverick” [2022], and has almost had his head decapitated in “The Last Samurai” [2003].

Cruise has pushed not only himself, but his crew to bring ground-breaking stunts to the big screen, once even making adjustments to the aforementioned crew to pull off the Burj Khalifa climbing sequence.

“I talked to Tom Cruise about it about ten years ago, about the [stunt] in Mission: Impossible where he ran outside the building,” actor Matt Damon said to Conan O’Brien in an interview. “I was like, ‘Can you explain how that happened?’ The way he explained it he goes, ‘I’d been dreaming of this stunt for years and I went to the safety guy and I explained what I was going to do and the guy said it was too dangerous.’ He goes, ‘So I got another safety guy.’”

Cruise has not stopped pushing the boundaries of film-making however, with his most recent film, “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” [2023] having three big budget stunts behind its belt.

For the seventh installment in the M:I franchise, Cruise would not only drive a motorcycle off of a cliff face but he would also inspire his crew to create an entire steam engine to launch off a ravine. 

Cruise and the movie’s writer and director, Christopher McQuarrie would go in-depth on the construction of such a spectacle in a behind the scenes video. 

The train reconstruction is not the only new vehicle built for the film with a yellow Fiat 500 being decked out with IMF [Impossible Mission Force: the spy agency from the films and show] equipment being added in to make driving the automobile more difficult.

It is not just building the spectacles either that makes the franchise so popular. Immense amount of effort is also put into sectioning off roads and buildings in order to film action sequences like the one in Rome for “Dead Reckoning Part One.”

“I think it’s really cool that he can do all those things especially in the new mission impossible movie,” senior Brighton Streeter said. “I saw some youtube video about how he jumped off the cliff on the motorcycle, and it was just absolutely mind blowing to me.”

With “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two” supposedly releasing in June 2024, hopes are high for more outlandish stunts and set pieces as the Ethan Hunt [Cruise]’s IMF team travels to find the Sevastopole, a crashed Russian submarine containing an evil AI: the Entity.