From the Official www.TomCruise.com Blog:
Check out the latest blog post from a new guest blogger for the Official TomCruise.com Blog! Thanks to everyone that has sent in blog submissions. This post comes from Dave Beauchene, who offers his opinion on why Tom Cruise continues to perform his own stunts in his movies, including his upcoming film Knight and Day. Thanks Dave for your awesome work!
I have no idea why Tom Cruise insists on doing the majority of his own stunts in movies. It defies Hollywood convention and, to a degree, rationality. Even bit performers are not expected to take their own tumbles, and rightfully so; stunt work is a whole other profession. Stars of his caliber are rarely allowed to do their own on-screen walking.
But there he goes: sprinting down a cluttered city street; riding a motorcycle through a wall of fire and pulling a nose-wheelie moments later; base jumping; rock climbing thousands of feet above the ground; outrunning a torrent of crashing aquarium water; being blown diagonally into a sedan. And sure enough, it’s him every single time.
But the funny thing is that we don’t tend to think anything of it. We see Cruise land on the hood of a speeding car, and we just buy it. The thing is that as rare as this is, we’ve never known it any other way. Cruise has always been the total embodiment of his characters.
I challenge you to find a single phoned-in Tom Cruise moment. It doesn’t exist. The same commitment that somehow convinces Tom he should throw himself off the edge off a building for a scene is what allows him to pull off something like jumping off a building in Mission Impossible III. Moreover, Cruise still somehow convinces us he’s human. We believe his characters are real people, always, despite the nose-wheelies.
The popular image of the action star can change; Cruise remains Cruise, and we still tend to feel that, even in real life, it might be good to have him around in a desperate situation. We know that a great production team has helped it to look as though Tom has miraculously landed on Cameron Diaz’s hood, but we sort of believe he could pull it off, too. At any rate, we certainly believe he’d try.
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