The only condition for Tom Cruise to agree to participate in the 2024 Olympics

We now know the whole story behind Tom Cruise’s participation in the closing ceremony of the Paris Games.

What a flag bearer to bring the games to Los Angeles! Tom Cruise caused a sensation last month when he jumped off the roof of the Stade de France during the closing ceremony of the Paris 2024 Games. The actor went to retrieve the Olympic flag and take it to California. A stunt he insisted on performing himself, as Casey Wasserman, president of the LA28 committee, recounts today during a conference this weekend (via EW):

“We presented the project on Zoom to Tom Cruise and the original idea was to have a person in the stadium as a stunt double. We thought that Tom Cruise wouldn’t be available to do the four hours of filming (of the pre-recorded video in the streets of Paris and the cargo plane). We said to ourselves: We’ll do the thing with the Hollywood sign, he’ll hand it over, and that’ll be good enough. Maybe we’ll just have a stunt double for the rest…” Except that Tom Cruise almost immediately accepted the job. But with one condition:

“After five minutes of the presentation, Tom Cruise stops me and says: I’m in! But I’ll only do it if I can do everything. Even the stunt! He refused to have a stunt double and insisted on doing every aspect of the sequence himself.”

On the roof, on a motorbike in Paris, in the air in a parachute above Los Angeles or on Hollywood Hill, it was good. Tom Cruiseall the way!

The president of the LA28 committee had difficulty believing it until the end.I thought that when his team realized how many days of shooting and rehearsals this was going to take, he would back down. But not at all. On the contrary, at each stage of the process, he got more involved and more committed.“.

It should be noted that Tom Cruise did all this for free, and during the already busy shooting of the eighth film Mission: Impossible.

“He finished a day of shooting Mission: Impossible at 6pm in London, got straight on a plane and landed in Los Angeles at 4am. Then he shot the scene where he gets on this military cargo plane. There, over California, he does two jumps out of the plane. He didn’t like the first one, so he did a second one… And then he flew in a helicopter to the Hollywood sign, where he filmed the sequence from 1pm to 5pm. And finally, he flew to Burbank airport and flew back to London, to return to the set of his film.” Tom Cruisehe really is the champion of impossible missions!