‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Star Shares Wild Story Of Tom Cruise Almost Killing Him

'Top Gun: Maverick' Star Details Story Of Tom Cruise Almost Killing Him

Paramount Pictures


Tom Cruise’s unwavering obsession with adrenaline and commitment to performing his stunts is a well-established part of Hollywood lore. After all, the guy is now 60 years old and is arguably still the world’s pre-eminent action star. He certainly isn’t showing any signs of slowing down, either, as his latest film Top Gun: Maverick is currently the 11th highest-grossing movie ever made.

Cruise’s adrenaline junkie attitude isn’t just a character he plays for the cameras, either, as his Top Gun: Maverick co-star Glen Powell recently shared a story of the time that Cruise almost “killed him.”

Appearing on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon to promote his latest film Devotion (yet another aerial war drama, only this time Powell is starring alongside Jonathan Majors instead of Cruise and Miles Teller), Powell detailed the time that he thought Cruise almost killed him when the pair went skydiving a few years ago.

“That was actually the second date with my girlfriend… We were gonna go do some reshoots in London. I say ‘I wanna go skydiving while I’m at here’ and he says “The skydiving here is great.” Sends a helicopter for me but it got so windy that the skydiving team, I was with the UK skydiving team, they said it’s so dangerous we should not go skydiving. I said ‘Alright, I’m no hero.’ So we scrapped it and went back and then Tom hit me up a couple of weeks later he said ‘Hey man, what are you scared?’ You never took me up on skydiving,” Powell said during an interview on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

Powell then detailed the experience of the jump and how he thought Cruise “just killed him”:

“So, with the girl that I was seeing at that time, it was our second date, we went skydiving and when I got there, I found out that Tom’s only request was that Glen cannot go skydiving with another person. He has to go solo the first time. So I literally have to jump out of this plane by myself, but the worst part is that I couldn’t find my tab when I was falling. My first thought was like ‘Oh Tom just killed me, he’s gonna feel so bad.’ I’m looking for the tab and I went ‘You’re not Tom Cruise, you’ll never be Tom Cruise why did you do this?’ And then I finally pulled out, I was way below, came in hot, made it.”

Devotion, which stars Chistina Jackson, Joe Jonas, Thomas Sadoski, Serinda Swan, and Daren Kagasoff in addition to Powell and Majors, hits theaters in the United States on Wednesday, November 23.

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