No other actor in the whole of Hollywood does stunts quite like Tom Cruise does stunts. Despite having hit the age of 56, the A-lister is well-known for being one of the few stars who do their own action sequences. That's right: Come rain, come shine, Tom will still be found jumping from rooftops, hanging from helicopters and racing cars down the highway.
However, that's not to say that it's an easy job. In fact, it seems that Tom defies death on a regular basis, tempting fate with his crazy stunts on set. And while the father-of-three has thankfully escaped thus far, he has certainly gone home with a fair few brutal injuries, the most recent of which is a broken ankle.
Production on the new movie Mission: Impossible - Fallout was halted for two months after Tom broke his ankle while filming a jump, then proceeded to run on said broken ankle. Claiming that he "knew instantly" that his bone was broken when it bent hitting a wall, the actor has said that he had to finish the scene because he immediately knew he wouldn't be coming back anytime soon. Amazingly, the painful incident made the final cut of the film and is available for all to see.
Pretty excruciating, right? Not to mention, that now, 11 months after the brutal injury, Tom has come out saying that it is still broken and not completely healed. During an appearance on The Sunday Project, the actor recently spoke in further detail about his latest injury, claiming that it disrupted his life for a long time.
Tom - who also spoke about the injury on a recent episode of Graham Norton - said: "Yeah I ran...I just (wanted to) keep going because I know I'm not doing this again. I had to go into full rehab. I had friends calling 'Oh man, you want to come down to the south of France.' (I had to reply) I have got 10 to 12 hours of rehab. I don't recommend breaking that bone, it's not pleasant. I needed to go into that wall and grab the side. So I just held my foot there, literally nanoseconds too long and it broke."
The Mission Impossible: Fallout star also explained that he has endured 'years of training' to avoid these types of injuries, despite it not working out this time. "I spent years training for these things and I have been doing it for years," he told interviewers. "So we do everything we can possible to limit any kind of mistakes and we are very thorough about how we approach these things and calculate it. When you are going, there are times I'm not wearing a helmet and we are going high speed."
So, I guess we've figured out exactly why Tom Cruise gets paid the big bucks! Good on you Tom for getting up and continuing the shot, you're a braver person than me!
