Film
Mission: Impossible and the extreme athletes changing Hollywood action
With a new installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise about to drop, it’s the perfect moment to celebrate how extreme sports athletes have elevated otherworldly stunts in Hollywood blockbusters.
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There was the exploding fish tank in the first Mission Impossible and the opening free-solo rock-climbing sequence in Mission: Impossible 2, but it really wasn’t until Tom Cruise strapped himself to an A400 cargo plane in 2015’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation that secret field agent Ethan Hunt – the character played by Cruise, who’s cheated death more times than any actor in history doing his own stunt work – emerged as the most enduring and vertigo-inducing action hero of his generation. It took eight takes of Cruise barreling down a runway clasped to the door of the plane via a rigged vest to get the shot that the film’s director Christopher McQuarrie ultimately used.
That sequence set a new standard for the franchise and, perhaps unwittingly, backed McQuarrie and his team of producers, which includes Cruise, into a corner. Henceforth, every Mission: Impossible instalment would require a signature stunt, each one bigger and more sensational than the last. With that sort of mandate, it was all but inevitable that the creators of the Mission: Impossible franchise would someday call upon the services of someone like Jon Devore, manager of the Red Bull Air Force and one of the most decorated aerial stunt coordinators of all time.
Jon DeVore has logged over 22,000 skydives and BASE/Wingsuit jumps
© Michael Clark/Red Bull Content Pool
Jon DeVore with fellow Red Bull Air Force team members
© Michael Clark/Red Bull Content Pool
Devore, who’s logged more than 22,000 skydives and BASE/Wingsuit jumps is a bona fide legend in the field of aerial stunt work and cinematography. He also represents a small but growing cohort of action-sports athletes who have heeded the siren call of Hollywood as filmmakers seek to bring over-the-top stunts to life. Whether it's skydiving, wingsuiting or a slightly more terrestrial sport like parkour or freerunning, the collaborative work of these daredevil athletes and high-octane Hollywood producers has never been stronger.
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Teaching Tom Cruise to BASE jump
In addition to being a two-time World Champion and a member of the Red Bull Air Force for two decades, Devore has amassed a sizeable filmography. He’s worked on Iron Man 3 (2013), Point Break (2015) and The Hangover Part III (2013) among many others.
The accomplished stunt veteran cites his work in Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) as one of his most memorable ‘pinch-me’ moments. “We were in downtown Chicago, and at that point, no one had done any wingsuit urban flying, and we were the first people in history to jump the Willis Tower and fly in formation through the city,” he says. “They closed off five square city blocks for us. It was just insane that we had permission and when we’d land, Michael Bay would come out and hug us. Crew members who’d worked with [Bay] since he started later joked that all they’d ever gotten was a ‘f**k you’ from Michael. Never a hug,” he says, laughing.
The remarkable base jump
© Paramount/picturedesk.com
Devore’s biggest film achievement, however, must be the role he played in what many consider to be the greatest stunt in cinema history. On the set of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (2023) Devore was one of a handful of experts hired to help train Cruise for the scene in which he executes a motorcycle BASE jump stunt effectively skydiving through a Norwegian mountain range after launching himself off a cliff driving a motocross bike. “At first I was training [Cruise] to speed fly because there were two scenes of him speed flying down a mountain,” Devore says in a recent interview. Speedflying is a sport that combines elements of paragliding but at much higher speeds and with more acrobatic turns involved as participants are typically gliding down a mountain slope. “And then there was the motorcycle BASE jump - so it was teaching him how to speed fly and how to BASE jump.” Cruise, he says, was “one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met and worked with, and now he’s a friend.”
Jon DeVore, one of the most decorated aerial stunt coordinators of all time
© Jody MacDonald/Red Bull Content Pool
The release of Mission: Impossible - Final Reckoning, which opens in theatres on May 23, is a bittersweet moment for Devore. Had it not been for a near-fatal speed flying accident in 2021, which happened while he was on a two-week hiatus after being on location with Mission: Impossible for months, the 50-year-old would’ve helped train Cruise for what’s being billed as the final instalment of the Mission: Impossible franchise.
Tom Cruise on shoot for The Final Reckoning
© Paramount
Still, the occasion offers Devore a chance to share a few of his experiences working with Cruise. In the earliest phases of teaching the four-time Academy Award nominee to speed fly, Devore got the full Cruise treatment. “He was really pressing me, saying ‘I want to go up there. I want to fly.’” Devore recalls. “He was like ‘I can do that. Bring me up to the top of the mountain.’ He’d be that intense, but the stunt coordinator said if you cave to him then I’m sending you home, so you must stand your ground and within a few days [Cruise’s] respect for me came quick.”
Tom Cruise on ready ready to leap into action
© Paramount
A year later Devore was teaching Cruise how to BASE jump and the first step in that process was intensive skydiving. “He asked me ‘what’s the most jumps you’ve done in a day?’ I told him 27 but it’s pointless to do that many jumps because after 10 to 12, you stop retaining stuff,” Devore recalls. “And he said, ‘We’ll do 20 a day at least.’ I’m like all right big talker - let’s start jumping. Over those six weeks, we did a minimum of 20 a day and the most we did was 31. We jumped that hard every day and when we finished, I’d be burnt out, but he’d go to his trailer switch into full motocross gear and do two to three hours of motocross training.”
Discover what these action-sports experts can really do
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The birth of action-sports stunt work
While certainly a historic figure in the universe of actors doing cinematic stunt work, Cruise is part of a continuum that dates back more than a century. The first recorded Hollywood stunt was in 1908, but it was the silent-era pioneers Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin who incorporated all sorts of stunts in their films in the 1930s that brought that form of filmmaking to the masses. Then came the era of the Westerns which leaned heavily on horse stunts.
In more recent decades, stunt work in films has started to exploit the kind of activities that action-sports athletes have expertise in. The emergence of the X Games helped pull extreme athletics into the mainstream and documentary filmmakers like Warren Miller and Taylor Steele made extreme skiing and surfing respectively more accessible. There were several cultural threshold moments. One was the release of Point Break in 1991, which starred Keanu Reeves as a federal agent who infiltrates a bank-robbing gang - headed up by a charismatic leader named Bodhi, played by the late Patrick Swayze. When Bodhi and his gang weren’t robbing banks and running from the law, they were chasing giant waves or jumping out of planes. Point Break brought skydiving and big wave surfing into the mainstream.
Sean MacCormac flying high
© Craig O'Brien/Red Bull Content Pool
Then came the social media revolution. “Half of my [social media] audience is producers or directors. People that just want to see all my possibilities,” says Sean MacCormac, another Red Bull Air Force member whose disciplines include wingsuit flying and skydiving “I’m really trying to do these things in a short segment format with music and edits and multiple angles, so it's engaging to my audience,” says MacCormac, who has sizeable followings on Instagram and YouTube and film credits that include Godzilla (2014) and Vice (2018). ”That's been a huge part of my creative passion. I’m trying to use all the different aspects of [my work] from just how I can perform some of those different things, then film them and present the storytelling.”
Parkour athlete Hazal Nehir was cast in the Netflix thriller 6 Underground
© Philip Platzer/Red Bull Content Pool
In a similar vein, Hazal Nehir, an athlete from Turkey who specialises in freerunning and parkour has brought her magic to social media and Hollywood. Her TikTok videos often generate hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of views. But when she was cast in the Netflix action/thriller 6 Underground in 2018 which had a $150m USD budget she got a taste of the high stakes of being on set with a demanding director like Michael Bay. “It was really stressful,” says Nehir, 30. “It was my first job ever, it was really big and we were doing hardcore parkour.” The experience didn’t deter her from finding more work. “After that I did commercials and things which I really enjoyed. I’ve been thinking about doing acting classes – because the last job I did I really enjoyed. It was a social media commercial in which I needed to act as well.”
Luke Aikins with plane for Red Bull's Endless Skydive project
© Michael Clark/Red Bull Content Pool
There’s an innate respect among performers whether they’re performing onstage, acting in a film or jumping out of an airplane in a wingsuit executing a HALO jump at 25,000ft (7,620m). At the end of the day, it’s all spectacle. Luke Aikins, who works with the Devore in the Red Bull Air Force, recalls coordinating the YouTube live event Ascension, during which the magician David Blaine was suspended 25,000ft in the air by 52 large balloons above the Arizona desert then detached and parachuted to the ground. “I ran the whole thing,” Aikins says of the stunt, which required 14 months of training in both skydiving and ballooning. Aikins and Blaine still share a bond to this day. “[Blaine] came and stayed at my house for a month and taught my son magic,” Aikins says. “He's a good friend.”
Tom Cruise hanging from a plane during the filming of Mission Impossible
© Paramount
With a $400m budget, Final Reckoning is one of the most expensive films ever made. And reviews out of the Cannes Film Festival, where the film premiered, suggest that the action sequences could match the jaw-dropping stunts that Devore had helped craft. One sequence that’s attracting attention has Cruise laid out flat on the wing of a biplane after spending 22 minutes out of the cockpit well beyond what safety guidelines allow. Cruise has been coy about whether this is in fact the final installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise and if it isn’t, you can only imagine what other stunts they may dream up along the way to the next.
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