Bizarre Things That Happened On The Mission: Impossible Sets

The production of any movie in the "Mission: Impossible" franchise can be frenetic and chaotic. Given that the franchise's lead star and producer Tom Cruise, who ushered the IP from its television roots to the big screen, pushes for riveting and realistic set pieces executed with practical stunts, production isn't always swift and is often rife with various hiccups. That's part of why it takes an average of five years for each "Mission: Impossible" film to come out.

But for what it's worth, the series is widely seen as one of the best action franchises in cinematic history, showing no signs of aging despite having seven movies released across nearly three decades since the first "Mission: Impossible" in 1996. Each film has carved an identity of its own that's able to withstand the flux of CGI-heavy action and superhero movies, which have dominated the entertainment landscape in the past decade and a half.

That being said, the scale of each film's production opens the window for many bizarre things to take place on and off sets. These range from the various injuries that Cruise has sustained from his insistence on doing his own death-defying stunts to tiffs between him and his fellow cast and crew members, logistical nightmares, unforeseen external circumstances for the production to deal with, and even just amusing occurrences that the cast can use as anecdotes for promotional interviews and press tours. Here's a look at some bizarre things that have happened on the sets of the "Mission: Impossible" movies.

Despite 2000's "Mission: Impossible 2" being the black sheep of the franchise in its critical reception (and every other possible way), you can't deny that the movie has its fair share of iconic and memorable moments. One, in particular, is the opening scene where Ethan Hunt free-climbs a mountain in Utah on his vacation, reintroducing the character as a carefree daredevil who eats danger for lunch.

Tom Cruise faced some resistance to the sequence and its execution from both studio executives and director John Woo. Cruise revealed on "Friday Night with Jonathan Ross" that Sherry Lansing, then-head of Paramount Pictures, and other executives were worried about insuring the stunt. "They kept trying to cut the sequence out of the movie, saying, 'Figure something out,'" Cruise told Ross. "I said, 'I can't figure out a better opening.'"

Additionally, Woo took umbrage with Cruise's insistence on performing the stunt himself, thousands of feet high up from the ground. "I was really mad that he wanted to do it, but I tried to stop him and I couldn't," the director told Entertainment Weekly. "I was so scared I was sweating. I couldn't even watch the monitor when we shot it." Woo's concerns weren't assuaged much when Cruise sustained a serious injury while making a leap from one ledge to another. The actor told Jonathan Ross, "I tore my shoulder on that shot actually, because I had to hold it as the helicopter was coming in. The harness, the wire, it wasn't at the right height, so I actually had to hold myself there. It was fun."

Thandiwe Newton, who plays professional thief Nyah Hall in "Mission: Impossible 2," recalled her negative experience working with Tom Cruise in a 2020 interview with Vulture. When asked why she never returned to the franchise, Newton said, "Oh, I was never asked. I was so scared of Tom [Cruise]. He was a very dominant individual. He tries superhard [sic] to be a nice person. But the pressure. He takes on a lot."

The actress cited one particular incident during production when she and Cruise were struggling to make one scene work, which she didn't think "was a very well-written scene." Newton detailed how she felt John Woo's direction was "unhelpful" as she and Cruise rehearsed the scene multiple times, including one take where the two actors switched characters per Cruise's suggestion. "It just pushed me further into a place of terror and insecurity. It was a real shame," Newton said.

She went on to reveal how Cruise's stress and frustrations manifested physically, saying, "I remember at the beginning of the night, seeing this slight red mark on his nose, and by the end of the night, I kid you not — this is how his metabolism is so fierce — he had a big whitehead where that red dot was. It would take anyone else 48 hours to manifest a zit. I saw it growing, and it was like the zit was me, just getting bigger and bigger." Newton repeatedly insisted that Cruise "wasn't horrible," and that he was just "really stressed."

The marketing for "Mission: Impossible III" had heavy odds stacked against it. First, the middlingly-reviewed "Mission: Impossible 2" was released six years prior, which even in the 2000s was enough time for general audiences to move past a seemingly dormant franchise. Second, Tom Cruise had become somewhat of a PR nightmare as a controversial name in the entertainment industry, with his outspoken advocacy for Scientology and abhorrent claims against psychiatry. Such factors would understandably lead any marketing team to take a few stunts to hype a movie.

However, publicity stunts, for the most part, stand at a high risk of going really wrong. Such was the case for the promotion of "Mission: Impossible III" in 2006 when some 4,500 newspaper racks of the Los Angeles Times were randomly rigged with an audio device to play the "Mission: Impossible" theme when opened. However, the red plastic devices and their wiring weren't always concealed effectively, leading bystanders to assume they were bombs. Bomb squads were called in, and the whole effort wound up causing more harm than good.

To be fair, the issue wasn't born out of any ill intention of giving a bomb scare to the public, but rather out of poor execution of the promotion. What could have become a pleasant surprise for unsuspecting bystanders ended up scaring those very same bystanders away. It would be a stretch to say that this incident alone caused the disappointing box office performance of the film, which ended up being the lowest grosser in the entire franchise, but it definitely didn't help its case.

As exciting as it can be to watch a riveting car chase such as the one in "Mission: Impossible –- Rogue Nation," it can be equally as mundane to shoot such scenes. With the spare time that actors are left with when a scene is being lit or staged through multiple takes and shots, they sometimes have to find their own way to pass the time. That boredom can lead to fun and sometimes bizarre pranks on set.

Such was the case with the chase sequence in "Rogue Nation," where the anxious Benji (Simon Pegg) unwittingly bears the brunt of field partner Ethan's rash driving. Pegg recalled on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" how he became a target of Cruise's pranks on set. As the two actors were seated in the car, shooting in the scorching heat of Morocco for five days, Cruise would turn on Pegg's seat heaters without him knowing. He'd do it while making sure that Pegg was regularly hydrated by the crew, which Pegg remarked was like the kind of torture seen in the 1995 psycho-thriller "Seven," where serial killer John Doe keeps his victims barely alive just to torture them again.

It took three days before Pegg finally found out why he was the one sweating the most, after which he waged a prank war with Cruise on who could switch on the other person's seat heater without them knowing. Pegg's final blow to Cruise was turning on the latter's seat warmer and covering its indicator light with a sliver of black tape that he procured from a gaffer on set. When Cruise finally discovered the trick, he had to pay respect. "He gave me that one," Pegg said, laughing.

One of the most memorable stories from the sets of the "Mission: Impossible" movies is that of Tom Cruise breaking his ankle on the set of the franchise's sixth movie, "Mission: Impossible — Fallout," thanks to the popular promotional interview of the film's cast on "The Graham Norton Show." While shooting for the stunt where Ethan leaps from one building to the other, barely landing the jump as he grabs onto the ledge of the building, Cruise's foot hit the side of the building, and he broke his ankle. The cast showed slow-mo footage of the injury on the aforementioned show, and it's gruesome enough to draw loud gasps from the audience.

While an injury to that extent would immediately make the cast and crew stop rolling the cameras, Cruise epitomized the saying "The show must go on" by soldiering on to finish the take, climbing up the ledge and running off-camera, albeit with a limp. To allow Cruise to recover from his injuries, the production faced an eight-week delay with a possible cost of $80 million in retaining the cast and crew from taking on any other jobs during the hiatus. However, the film made its original July 2018 release date regardless, and the added costs as a result of the injury were offset by insurance.

Audiences spotted the same take of the jump shown on "The Graham Norton Show" in the film, making the moment unintentionally iconic because of how indicative it is of Cruise's devotion to practical stunts, even in the face of adverse injuries.

Nothing is certain except for death, taxes, and — for film productions and celebrities — paparazzi. Paparazzi are notorious for going to great lengths to capture the latest pictures of famous celebrities and production photos of anticipated movies, the latter of which can even end up spoiling important scenes and plot elements. Such was the situation faced by the makers of "Mission: Impossible -– Fallout" during production in Paris in 2017.

In "Fallout," Ethan Hunt reluctantly gets tangled in a plot to break his old nemesis Solomon Lane out of captivity -– a plan that involves killing innocent cops during a prisoner transport. He imagines how the events could play out, which devastates him and pushes him to deviate into another version of the plan where the police are spared. It's an important moment in the film that exhibits Ethan's disapproval of the notion that one life is worth sacrificing for the greater good — something that brings him into conflict with his superiors.

The scene provides shock value for audiences, even if it ends up being Ethan's imagination, but it would undoubtedly have been ruined if the paparazzi had leaked this moment. Not to mention, the sight of Tom Cruise's character killing innocent cops could also have ended up becoming another PR challenge. In the Blu-ray commentary of the film, director Christopher McQuarrie details how, in order to counter the many paparazzi clicking photos of the production from across a river, the crew had to block out any visibility of the set from the outside public by rigging 300 feet of silk.

There are a few roles that every actor is primarily known and remembered for, and Henry Cavill has a handful under his belt: Geralt of Rivia in Netflix's "The Witcher" series, Sherlock Holmes in Netflix's "Enola Holmes" movies, and most prominently, Superman in the soon-to-be-rebooted DC film universe. In a promotional interview on "The Graham Norton Show," the actor's "Mission: Impossible -– Fallout" co-star Simon Pegg recalled one moment during production when Cavill's stint as the Man of Steel generated some good humor on set with lead star Tom Cruise.

While shooting the scene where Ethan Hunt drives a compact BMW with his team and August Walker (Cavill) after capturing Solomon Lane in Paris, Cavill, seated with Cruise and Pegg, felt cramped in the car and decided to exit and jog back to the starting point of the stunt for the next take. As he jogged, Pegg and Cruise would drive by Cavill while singing the classic Superman theme from the 1978 movie. "It's one of the coolest moments of my life, is having Tom Cruise do that while driving next to you," Cavill said.

After the success of 2018's "Mission: Impossible — Fallout," Tom Cruise announced in January 2019 not one, but two sequels, to be shot back-to-back with director Christopher McQuarrie returning for a 2021 and 2022 release, respectively. Soon enough, after more cast members joined the film throughout the rest of 2019, production began in Italy in February 2020, only to soon be halted by the rise of COVID-19 cases in the country and around the world. Nearly every film and TV production was stopped by March, and the next few months saw nationwide lockdowns implemented across the world in an attempt to contain the contagious virus.

By July and August, some countries began allowing productions to continue as long as they adhered to the protocols set in place to counter the pandemic, such as the use of masks, routine tests, and two-week quarantines. This included the production of "Mission: Impossible 7," which was well underway by September in the U.K. and Norway, where Cruise reportedly paid $700,000 to charter two cruise ships to accommodate the cast and crew during filming. However, production was halted again that October after 12 crew members tested positive in Italy.

After a slew of halts and resumptions, production finally wrapped in April 2023, three whole years after filming began. By February 2021, Paramount decided against shooting both sequels back-to-back, as they also had the release and promotion of Cruise's "Top Gun: Maverick" pending. The release for "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One" saw five delays across the span of two years, partly due to its release date being handed to "Maverick" with each pandemic-related shift in Paramount's release slate.

In December 2020, during production for "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One," The Sun released audio recordings of Tom Cruise lashing out at crew members for not complying with safety protocols kept in place for the film's production to continue. The star's heated rant was rife with profanity, repeatedly warning them against flouting the rules again, or else they'd be fired. To be fair, he had a pretty good reason for the outburst. 

The entertainment industry ground to a total halt during the COVID-19 pandemic, and, as a result, several productions, including "Dead Reckoning," suffered along with millions of film crew members who found themselves unemployed. "That's it. No apologies," Cruise says in the recording. "You can tell it to the people that are losing their f***ing homes because our industry is shut down." Getting the film's production back on track during the pandemic after many shut-downs was painstaking enough for Cruise, and all it would take for the production to shut down again was any one crew member carelessly flouting the very protocols kept in place for production to resume. "We are not shutting this f***ing movie down. Is it understood? If I see it again, you're f***ing gone," Cruise warned. 

Many found Cruise's reactions justified, as preventative measures such as masks and social distancing during the pandemic absurdly became a political debate. However, that didn't stop people from drawing comparisons to Cruise's memorable "Tropic Thunder" character Les Grossman, who would often verbally burst out with profane abuses in the 2008 film.