Tom Cruise set the bar too high.
While promoting his new film “The Weight” at the Sundance Film Festival on Sunday, Ethan Hawke spoke about how Cruise, 63, has changed the game when it comes to stunt work in Hollywood.
“Tom Cruise has totally changed what’s expected for actors,” Hawke, 55, told Variety. “Some part of me is getting angry over the years because everyone somehow feels like they’re less if they use a stunt team.”
Cruise famously does his own stunts in his movies including the “Mission: Impossible” franchise. He dangled from an upside-down plane and drove a motorcycle off a cliff before parachuting to safety in 2023’s “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” and 2025’s “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.”
Hawke did his own stunts in “The Weight,” in which he plays a widower who is torn from his daughter and gets sent to a brutal work camp during the Depression era. The film also stars Russell Crowe, Julia Jones, Austin Amelio and Avi Nash.
“What I liked about our movie is there were no ridiculous stunts. It’s human,” the five-time Oscar nominee said. “It’s not about things blowing up, so most of the stunts were things we could do. They weren’t superhero things.”
Director Padraic McKinley, who previously worked with Hawke on the 2020 miniseries “The Good Lord Bird,” interrupted Hawke to acknowledge the star’s dedication to the film.
“Ethan is not saying that he did every single stunt, including driving those old cars with insane clutches. He did every single one, except one little wide shot after he almost tore his hamstring off the bone,” said McKinley, 51.
Cruise has explained why he chooses to do his own stunts in his projects.
“People feel the authenticity. You feel the dedication and joy in learning something and then creating. That is something that I tell artists all the time: Don’t ask permission to create,” he said in an interview with People last year. “If you’re interested in dancing and singing, do it. I will learn a skill, and I know eventually I’m going to use it in a movie.”
The Hollywood icon, who has starred in eight “Mission: Impossible” movies since 1996, also noted that “if it was easy” to do the wild action scenes in the franchise, “I guess we wouldn’t want to do it.”
“I love making movies,” Cruise added. “It’s not what I do. It’s who I am.”
