Tom Cruise sitting on top of the Burj Khalifa, 2010















If you saw Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol in IMAX, for my money the best installment of the never ending franchise, this is the scene you will remember the most. The story goes Tom Cruise fired his own insurance company so he could perform this gravity-defying stunt atop Dubai's Burj Kalifa. In the scene, Cruise runs, slides, crawls and, yes, even flies around the tall skyscraper. That's 28,000 feet above the ground. The fact that Cruise looked so comfortable and at ease doing this stunt does show the high that results from performing such a risk-taking, death-defying endeavor.  I wholly recommend you check out the behind-the-scenes featurette of the stunt HERE.



Sitting atop the Burj Kalifa, Cruise seems completely in his element here. I don't think you could even pay me a million dollars for me to just sit on top of this beast of a tower. Cruise? A piece of cake, I do this for a living. Bless his twisted soul.


















It also doesn't look it's going to stop. This here is a picture of Cruise in a preparation meeting for The Mummy's zero-gravity plane scene. He looks like a kid in the candy store, pumped for the stunt. Cruise does most of his own stunts. Having spoken to a few stuntmen, it's all about the rush. Once you start doing it, it's very hard to stop. Much props to him, I don't think anyone else in Hollywood goes to the extent that Cruise does in making his action scenes look as realistic as possible.