Tom Cruise Banned Henry Cavill From Performing One Of Mission: Impossible's Scariest Stunts

Tom Cruise's quest to prove himself invincible is, in the most stupidly queasy way, one of the reasons people keep lining up for the "Mission: Impossible" movies. He upped the ante to an absurd degree with "Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol," when he climbed outside of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai and dangled somewhere around half a mile in the air. Not to be outdone by anyone other than himself, Cruise next strapped himself to the outside of a jet as it took off in "Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation."

Then came "Mission: Impossible – Fallout." This time out, Cruise decided to attempt a HALO jump – i.e. a high-altitude parachuting technique where someone hops out of a perfectly good aircraft and pulls their ripcord in low altitude after a perilously long descent. This is obviously not for the faint of heart. It's honestly not for 99% of the public because it requires the kind of specialized training that only an elite paratrooper or a rich maniac like Cruise can receive.

Typically, Cruise's stunts are standalone affairs meant to celebrate his capacity to do incredibly dangerous stuff after someone with extreme expertise has walked him through said dangerous stuff step-by-hazardous-step. He's a daredevil mimic, basically. This is not to diminish what he does. I've got to pop an Ativan before I simply set foot on a plane; I'm not about to jump out of one. But if someone had the urge to follow Cruise's lead and had access to the same training he gets, then they could do precisely what he does.

Which is to say that Henry Cavill has a very legit gripe at getting frozen out of the HALO jump in "Mission: Impossible – Fallout."

Henry Cavill has played Superman, which means he can fly, right? Oh, that's not how that works? Okay. But he can jump out of a plane and pull a ripcord. So why didn't he get to join Cruise on his HALO jump like his character does in "Mission: Impossible – Fallout?" According to Cavill in an interview with USA Today:

"The day came and I was begging Tom: 'I'm wearing a parachute, I've got some wind tunnel [training], surely I can just jump?' And he said, 'Henry, I know exactly how you feel. I get it, you've done every single stunt in the movie so far, but this one I can't let you do. It needs specific training.'"

I'm sorry, but that's just filthy. To be fair to Cruise, if Cavill really wanted to do that jump, he would've been on the phone with his agent all day, every day the second he got the role demanding to crash Cruise's private training sessions (or set up his own). To be fair to Cavill, he wasn't exactly in Cruise's superstar league then or now, so unless he wanted to get fired and replaced by another magazine-cover-worthy hunk he'd do exactly what he did: wait until the day of the jump, get denied and tell the same funny story over and over at the film's press junket.

In closing, Tom Cruise is an adrenaline junkie who gets to execute carefully managed extreme stunts because he's Tom Cruise. Henry Cavill could be Tom Cruise, but he's not so his ass gets grounded.