Tom Cruise is renowned by movie lovers for doing his own crazy stunts. The lifelong adrenaline junkie has ridden more motorcycles than you can count, been in dozens of car chases, scaled the Burj Khalifa (which happens to be the world’s tallest building), dangled from the side of a plane as it took off, done a HALO jump, and completed more genuinely death-defying stunts than many actual stuntpeople.

His next movie, Top Gun: Maverick, features a number of jaw-dropping aerial stunts thanks to the fighter jet sequences in the movie – exactly what you’d expect from any action movie with Tom Cruise. There was one sequence, however, that was so dangerous Cruise needed to get special permission from the United States Navy in order to film it. You might recognize that scene, an extreme low-altitude stunt in which Cruise’s character, Maverick, flies low to the ground through the desert, from the most recent trailer:

Director Joseph Kosinski revealed in a recent interview with EW that a scene like that has never been done before and the stunt was so dangerous, they had to get a specific clearance from the Navy to film it:

“For the sequence where Tom got to do some extreme low-altitude flying in this film, we had to get special permission from the Navy to do it. It was one of the most extreme aerial sequences that we could come up with. Also, getting to do a real launch off a carrier and a real landing on a carrier — no one else has been able to ever do that in a movie before. Tom got to fulfill every kind of aviation dream that he had.”

Both Kosinski and Cruise wanted the movie to be as visceral as possible. In an age of heavy CGI, almost all of the flight sequences are practical stunts rather than VFX – and yes, the actors are really in the jets. In order to capture this, the Navy gave filmmakers permission to set up IMAX-quality cameras in the rear cockpit seats of the F/A-18Fs (two-seater versions of the Super Hornet) in which the footage was shot. The actors were all actually in the jets sitting in the back seats and mimicking flight while the Navy pilot sat in the front seat.

To that end, filmmakers looked to cast actors who could not only act but also physically withstand the grueling G-forces put on their bodies during flight, up to 1,600 pounds of pressure. In the sequel, all the young pilots Maverick trains have already graduated from Top Gun flight school and are now enrolled in a special training program for advanced flight maneuvers. So the actors had to bring it. The physically demanding process was exhilarating, but also all but broke a few of the actors, explained Kosinski:

“The experience is thrilling but very physically grueling. The maneuvers that we were putting them through to tell this story were not something that you can just jump in and do. They all had to go through months of aerial training. We put them through a training course that Tom actually designed himself. He’s a licensed aerobatic pilot, and he was thrown into deep end when he did the first Top Gun without any training. So he knew that they would need to kind of work up to that level. So they started in Cessnas and then worked their way up aerobatic airplanes then into small single-engine jets before they were in the Super Hornet. Occasionally it made some of the actors sick and that even happens to experienced fighter pilots.”

With no crew and no director up in the jets, the actors were responsible for every aspect of filming during those sequences, creating a sense of intimacy in the middle of the movie’s most adrenaline-packed scenes.

Top Gun: Maverick is in theaters on June 26th.

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