New details have emerged about Tom Cruise’s stunts at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
The “Mission: Impossible” star concluded Sunday’s ceremony with a Hollywood-style stunt by jumping into the Stade de France and hopping on a motorbike, before pre-recorded footage showed him skydiving towards the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles and the 2028 Olympics.
While the feat seems most inspired by the stunt-packed “Impossible” film series, former “Late Late Show” producer Ben Winston told The Hollywood Reporter that the iconic passing of the baton was instead inspired by a Conan O’Brien skit from 15 years ago.
“I liked the idea of doing the majority of it in L.A. with a great opening in Paris,” Winston said Monday. “This is a really weird quote, but remember when Conan O’Brien started on ‘The Tonight Show’ and he moved from New York to L.A.?”
“He did a really funny sketch where he went across the country,” he continued of O’Brien’s hilarious 2009 opener. “That’s always stuck with me, so I thought, ‘How is Tom Cruise and all these incredible athletes going to carry that flag from Paris to Los Angeles?’ It’s a weird inspiration.”
Winston recalled that when he learned there was a “tradition of a 12-minute show” symbolizing the Olympic journey from host country to host country, he immediately thought, “Yeah, that would be awesome if we could just grab the flag and get Tom Cruise to do it.”
Winston said that while they had originally planned to have masked stuntmen perform the dangerous sequences, filming the final scene – which led Hollywood audiences to believe they were filming the next “Impossible” movie – went more smoothly than they expected.
Cruise descended a rope into the stadium, rode off on a motorcycle and even went skydiving in the pre-recorded footage.
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“Tom’s response was, ‘That’s a great idea, but I’m not going to have a stuntman in a balaclava. I’m going to be the one jumping off the roof and driving through Paris,'” he said Monday. “Obviously, that’s better for me.”
Cruise has clearly succeeded in his ongoing mission to be the city’s most daredevil A-list star, notably abseiling into a packed Paris Stadium before seizing the Olympic flag from gold medalist Simone Biles and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.
While he’s certainly pulled off similar stunts before, promoting “Top Gun: Maverick” (2022) with a dizzying flight drill for former “Late Late Show” host James Corden, the feat of insuring Cruise was likely just as difficult as the Olympic stunt itself.
“When we were doing the Top Gun skit on The Late Late Show, it was definitely something that was considered,” Winston told THR. “It was like, ‘So is the blame on the show or is the blame on Tom?’ I still don’t know the answer to that.”