Tom Cruise’s peculiar dance with dangerous stunts — that often get uncomfortably close to death — as an actor goes a long way back. Even before he decided to revive the “Mission: Impossible” franchise and sort of reinvent himself as an aging action hero with his beloved character Ethan Hunt, the actor was known for doing some of his own stunts instead of using a body double. One of those times, his head almost came into contact with a samurai sword and ended in tragedy. While shooting “The Last Samurai” – the classic 2003 epic period drama that delivered one of Cruise’s more solemn performances — an incident had the whole film crew scream in panic.
While filming a battle scene with Cruise and “Shōgun’s” Emmy-winner, Hiroyuki Sanada, the two were performing a stunt on mechanical horses, and one malfunctioned. Sanada’s “horse” was meant to stop a safe distance away from Cruise’s, but it didn’t, and the swing of his sword came uncomfortably close to the American’s neck. As Cruise recalled (via the Daily Mail), “One day we were shooting, I was on a mechanical horse and Hiro was on one too. He was approaching me and then suddenly his horse hit me and his sword was right here [points an inch from his neck]. Luckily Hiro is trained in martial arts. I trust him.”
Sanada also talked about the incident in a separate interview with Today. He said, “Tom’s neck was right in front of me, and I tried to stop swinging my sword, but it was hard to control with one hand. The film crew watching from the side all screamed because they thought Tom’s head would fly off.”
Tom Cruise had a few rendezvous with near-death experiences throughout his career
Apart from the extreme, daring, and often physically painful stunts Tom Cruise has pulled off in the last five “Mission: Impossible” movies, he had a few scares on other film sets, too. While making Tony Scott’s 1990 fast-paced sports drama, “Days of Thunder,” Cruise was doing his own driving scene in a NASCAR car when he lost control of the vehicle and spiraled off the track. As former car racing pro Hut Stricklin (who was a stunt driver and technical consultant on the movie) said in an interview for For the Win, “I guess he’d seen guys on TV squirming back and forth, left and right. He turned to the left, the car turned left. But when he goes back to the right… [crash]. [He] understood then. But too bad he had to kill a $100,000 camera,” referring to the equipment that became collateral damage.
Another car-related accident involving Cruise went down while shooting Doug Liman’s 2014 sci-fi actioner, “Edge of Tomorrow.” Although, to his credit, he wasn’t to blame in this case since he was literally in the passenger seat while his co-star Emily Blunt did all the driving and braked a little too late. As the actress recalled the chase scene casually on the late-night talk show “Conan” (via YouTube), “I hear Tom under his breath as I approach the right-hand turn, going ‘Brake, brake, brake. Oh God. Brake, brake, brake. Brake it hard.’ I left it too late, and drove us into a tree. I almost killed Tom Cruise.”
Although the “Top Gun” actor is well into his 60s now, he doesn’t seem to be slowing down much, which means you can likely expect more exciting anecdotes about escaping death in the future.
