Tom Cruise has become notorious for performing his own stunts, and Top Gun: Maverick is no exception. In fact, the entire cast underwent intense training in order to perform many of the wild aerial stunts that audiences saw on screen when they flocked to theaters in May to see Cruise reprise his role as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell more than three decades after the first film hit the big screen.
Speaking lat Deadline’s Contenders LA3C panel, director Joseph Kosinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer detailed the physical limits to which each actor was willing to push themselves in order to bring the picture to life — and the lengths Cruise was willing to go to in order to make it happen.
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“I knew we’d be able to get Tom on the plane, but we weren’t sure about the rest of the cast,” Kosinksi told the audience at the JW Marriott at L.A. Live. “So, Tom devised this three-month course for all the actors, to start with a very simple airplane and work their way up to the Navy jet. They all were able to do all their scenes in the jets for real, which is just phenomenal because you can’t imagine how physically difficult it is to do what they’re doing. They’re flying with real Top Gun pilots. They’re doing the same maneuvers, even more intense maneuvers than they do in training.”
The training didn’t just include aerial stunts. It also involved water survival, Bruckheimer said, describing one of the situations each cast member had to endure. “They put them into a cage blindfolded, dump them in the water about six or eight feet down and turn them upside down,” he said. “They had to figure out how to get out of that cage.”
Enduring months of training and even more time filming these stunts certainly took a toll on the cast, though Kosinski said they weren’t going to let that stop them from getting the scenes right.
“I think a couple of them had a hard time, but they wouldn’t let me know,” he said. “They would actually kind of keep it under wraps just because they wanted to make sure we were getting everything we needed to get.”
In fact, Bruckheimer revealed, there’s only one actor who didn’t get sick during training or during filming: Monica Barbaro. “The female is the strongest of all,” he said.
The success of Top Gun: Maverick has begged the question about whether audiences can expect another film in the near future, or if it might take another 35 years to get a Top Gun 3 on the big screen. Just as with Maverick, Kosinksi said it will come down to finding a story that needs to be told.
“Is there another story that is compelling enough that we need to go back?” he asked, adding: “It seems to me at the end of this film that Maverick has some gas left in the tank. He’s not settling down.”
Check back Wednesday for the panel video.
