Tom Cruise recalls jumping from roof at age four
Tom Cruise jumped off a roof when he was just four years old.
The Top Gun: Maverick actor famously does his own stunts in his movies and he revealed his daredevil tendencies emerged at a very young age. Even though he recalled fearing death when he made his first leap, it didn’t put him off for good.
Speaking during a panel discussion at the premiere of Top Gun: Maverick at the Cannes Film Festival this week, he said: “I think I was about four and a half years old, and I had this doll and you throw it up in the air and a parachute comes down. I played with this thing and I’d throw it off a tree and I was like ‘I really want to do this’. I remember taking the sheets off my bed, and I would tie a rope ... and I climbed up to the eave and I got up to the roof. I looked and my mother was in the kitchen — she had four kids — and I jumped off the roof.”
He added: “It’s that moment when you jump off the roof and you go ‘This is not gonna work. This is terrible. I’m gonna die’. And I hit the ground so hard. Luckily, it was wet. I don’t know how it happened but I figured out after that my face went past my feet as my a** hit the ground. And I saw stars in the daytime for the first time and I remember looking up going ‘This is very interesting’.”
The Mission: Impossible star also admitted he always wanted to figure out how to work his childhood exploits into his future career and said stunts aren’t the only skills he has tried to master for the sake of his career.
He said: “So I’d take dance lessons and put it into Les Grossman [his character in the movie Tropic
Thunder], or Rock of Ages, and take singing lessons so I had the skills.”