Mission Possible! 10 of Tom Cruise's Craziest Movie Stunts

For the Christopher McQuarrie-directed film Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Tom Cruise performed one of his most dangerous stunts yet when he drove a motorbike off a cliff before flying off it and parachuting to the ground.

According to McQuarrie and Cruise, the stunt took 500 hours of skydiving training and 13,000 motorbike jumps to perfect the sequence.

"The work that went into the motorbike shot was incredible," Skydive Langar's Karen Saunders, who worked on the stunt in the seventh Mission: Impossible installment, said. "We were all very nervous and, the moment he launched, everyone went quiet until the parachute opened. You don't want to be known as the person that killed a major A-list star!"

While appearing in a 2014 episode of Conan, Emily Blunt detailed the moment she almost killed Cruise while filming Edge of Tomorrow.

"I hear him going [quietly], 'Brake. Brake. Brake,'" she told Conan O'Brien about the action sequence. "'Em, brake the car! Brake the car!'"

Although the first take went well, Blunt reportedly took a turn too late during the second one and "drove us into a tree."

Instead of using green screen, Cruise added another death-defying stunt to his resumé when he scaled Dubai's 163-floor Burj Khalifa for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.

Cruise, who called the scene "a beautiful sequence," said he only had one night to rehearse on the actual building itself after the crew arrived in Dubai. He then bravely climbed Burj Khalifa with only a pair of gloves and a harness.

In an appearance on The Tonight Show, Cruise opened up about the extended driving sequence in the latest Mission: Impossible movie, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, in which his character risks his life and dives to a sunken submarine. He said he "can't see" a lot of times because of the reflection of the underwater lights.

"So, I would go in, kind of blind, spend a lot of time on the set figuring out [the movement] as we're figuring out the shots," he added. "Then, when I'm doing it, I have a hard time. Plus the suit, when it's wet, increases in weight by about 125 pounds. So, the kind of workouts and things that I have to do just to prepare for these things, it's years of development. And yeah, and I'm producing it, so it's also that kind of thing."

Cruise was also reportedly forced to breathe his own carbon monoxide and overcome the effects while working on the scene.

In Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, the Hollywood icon hung off an Airbus A400 as it took off.

Explaining how Cruise made the stunt effortlessly possible, director of photography Robert Elswit revealed the crew put the actor in a full-body harness and cabled him to the plane through the door.

"Inside the aircraft was an aluminum truss that was carefully bolted to the plane, which held the wires that went through the door, which held Tom," he explained to The Hollywood Reporter.

The cinematographer added, "He was also wearing special contact lenses to protect his eyes. If anything hit him at those speeds, it could be really bad. They were very careful about cleaning the runway so there were no rocks. And we took off in certain weather conditions; there were no birds. And he's sort of protected by the way the air moves over the wing."

Cruise also wore earplugs for added protection.

In an interview with Empire, Cruise revealed he had to train himself how to breathe before performing the stunt on a biplane's wing in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. He noted people cannot get oxygen "when you stick your face out, going over 120 to 130 miles an hour."

"There were times I would pass out physically; I was unable to get back into the cockpit," he added.

Meanwhile, director McQuarrie recalled seeing Cruise lying on the wing of the biplane after not being able to get back up off it.

The filmmaker revealed, "Making matters more difficult: the pilot only had three minutes' worth of fuel left, but couldn't land with Cruise on the wing."

Fortunately, Cruise managed to replenish the oxygen in his body and climb back up into the cockpit.

The proud filmmaker then told the attendees at the Cannes Film Festival, "No one on earth can do that but Tom."

The final scenes of Mission: Impossible – Fallout saw Cruise perform a helicopter chase while acting and operating the cameras simultaneously.

"He has no real plan; he just knows that he has to complete the mission," stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood said of Cruise's character. "All this stuff, it's a little erratic, it's a little last-minute. When he runs and jumps on that long line on the helicopter, he's not planning on jumping on it that way. He's running toward the helicopter, the helicopter takes off, and he's like, 'Well, if I let it go, we're all dead, so I've got to do something.' So it's always last-minute. [...] He will not give up; he's relentless. And that's got to come across."

Speaking with The New York Times, McQuarrie detailed the exhilarating motorcycle chase in the spy franchise's sixth movie.

"The initial idea was he would do a portion of the sequence free riding and the rest of it on these safety rigs, and when the rigs didn't work, we just went for it," he said. "Everything that you're seeing Tom doing, he's doing free riding on cold cobblestones. Sometimes there was rain; sometimes there was morning dew. There was always a danger of skidding and wiping out."

The filmmaker noted stunt drivers chased Cruise, but they reportedly faced miscommunications as some of them were locals who ended up being somewhere they were not supposed to be.

As a result, Cruise "had to be hypervigilant" as he also drove into close-ups at times.

Mission: Impossible II began with Cruise's character free-climbing, quickly becoming one of the franchise's most iconic scenes.

In an interview with Empire, the lead star looked back on the opener he filmed on the side of a cliff with only a safety cable to help him alleviate any impact.

"What people don't know is that there's a section where I'm jumping high to low, but my foot was broken," he admitted. "And I never mentioned it to anyone. Some of these injuries, what's the point? You just keep going."

Cruise and his costar Rebecca Ferguson trained with an extreme diver for their underwater scene in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. The father-of-three, for his part, learned how to hold his breath for six and a half minutes to film a single take of the sequence.

"We wanted to create a suspense underwater sequence without cuts. So doing that sequence was really interesting. We're underwater and we're doing breath-holds of 6 to 6 1/2 minutes. So I was doing all my training with the other stuff (on-set). It was very taxing stuff," Cruise told USA Today.