Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning Stunts ‘Will Melt Your Brain’, Says Christopher McQuarrie

There is nothing Tom Cruise won’t do for your big-screen entertainment. Over the last decade-plus, he’s cemented his reputation as the most daring man in Hollywood, not just a proper movie star, but a stunt powerhouse, a walking special effect. He’s biked off cliffs, flown fighter jets, climbed the Burj Khalifa, dangled from helicopters, base-jumped on loop, all in the name of our entertainment. And by the sounds of things, we ain’t seen nothing yet. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is mere months away, the concluding chapter to 2023’s Dead Reckoning (and, just maybe, the saga as a whole) that we’re assured will see Cruise and regular director Christopher McQuarrie go to even dizzier heights of daredevilry.

Take, for instance, the scene – as seen on Empire’s world-exclusive The Final Reckoning cover – in which Cruise clings to the wing of a 1930s Boeing Stearman biplane, careening through the air at 10,000 feet. The sequence was shot in South Africa, with results that promise to be electrifying. “There are stunts in this movie that will melt your brain,” McQuarrie laughs, speaking to Empire. “There would be a day in Africa — any day in Africa — where Tom would go out and do something that topped anything he had ever done before.” The mere thought of it is enough to leave you breathless. As was Cruise, all the way up there. “When you stick your face out, going over 120 to 130 miles an hour, you’re not getting oxygen,” he explains to Empire. “So I had to train myself how to breathe. There were times I would pass out physically; I was unable to get back into the cockpit.”

Still, that’s just the beginning. McQuarrie promises an even more mind-boggling, death-defying stunt in The Final Reckoning – one that surpasses not just the biplane sequence, but also an upcoming underwater maelstrom. By the sounds of things, we’ll know what it is once we see it. “I truly want to puke thinking about the stress,” McQuarrie says of the mysterious moment. “It was intense.” No mission is truly impossible for these two.

Read Empire’s full Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning cover story – going on set with Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie, and speaking to Simon Pegg, Pom Klementieff, Hayley Atwell and more – in the April 2025 issue, on sale Thursday 13 February. Pre-order a copy online here. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning comes to UK cinemas on 21 May.