Cruise taking his Mummy co-stars along on hair-raising stunts
TOM CRUISE is known for performing his own death-defying stunts in his action movies – but the cast of horror blockbuster The Mummy revealed he’s started roping in his co-stars.
Annabelle Wallis ( X-Men: First Class) said recently that Cruise convinced her to join him in a terrifying zero gravity plane crash stunt, when the scene could easily have been filmed in front of a green screen.
“Tom is renowned for making sure that the audience gets the most out of their cinematic experience,” Wallis, 32, told the audience at the CinemaCon convention, the annual Las Vegas gathering for cinema operators.
“So when it came to doing this sequence, we had options to do it on a stage.
“But Tom, in his glory and slight madness, was adamant that he wanted it to be done on a plane in zero gravity.”
The scene involved 64 takes during four high-altitude flights over two days, leading to “a lot of barfing”, according to writer and director Alex Kurtzman.
Wallis also revealed that Cruise, in true action hero style, had no problems keeping down his lunch.
Jake Johnson ( Jurassic World), who plays Cruise’s sidekick, said working with the star was a lot of fun, but a “terrifying” experience.
“We jump off buildings and towns explode, and Tom really does it all, and he insists his cast do it too, and I say the word ‘makes’,” said Johnson, 38, at the start of Universal’s presentation of its upcoming slate of movies.
“Yes, I got hurt. My character dies, I almost died. We’d do a stunt and it would hurt, and I’m like: ‘I think something went wrong because it hurt’, and he’d go: ‘Well yeah – we jumped off a building, dummy’.”
The Mummy tells the story of an ancient princess who is awakened from her crypt beneath the desert and unleashes a malevolence that has grown over millennia.
Sofia Boutella, 34, ( Kingsmen) takes on the role of the titular mummy monster – a female for the first time in cinematic history.
She revealed that she turned down Kurtzman’s job offer at first.
“He offered me the role and it was an honour, but I just came out of a movie where I was under a lot of make-up and I thought ‘not again’ and also playing a monster terrified me,” she said.
“It took a meeting with him and also understanding that, basically, the honour that it is to go back there ... and play this character.” – AFP