10 Movies That Dedicated Incredible Sequences To Their Actors

8. Mission: Impossible - Fallout - Tom Cruise

Over the course of the last three Mission: Impossible movies, it's fair to say that the spy tentpole franchise has effectively evolved to become a stunt showcase built around Tom Cruise's willingness to put himself in harm's way.

The fourth film, Ghost Protocol, tethered him to the side of the Burj Khalifa for our sweaty-palmed entertainment, while the sequel Rogue Nation had him cling to the side of a plane and spend an impossible amount of time breathing underwater, before the latest instalment decisively one-upped all of this.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout concludes with a breathtaking sequence in which Ethan Hunt (Cruise) hijacks a chopper in order to chase villain August Walker (Henry Cavill) through the skies, and in a virtually unprecedented feat of an actor taking the stunt-work into their own hands, Cruise did the overwhelming majority of it himself.

Cruise not only climbed a rope to reach the helicopter himself - with tethering, of course - but actually spent three months logging 2,000 hours of helicopter training in order to pilot the vehicle without a double or a green screen.

Director Christopher McQuarrie and stunt co-ordinator Wade Eastwood conceived the sequence with Cruise's unique penchant for death-defying behaviour in mind, and the result is one of the most impressive feats of practical stunt work in blockbuster history.

That's without even getting into the fact that Cruise also trained for over a year for the movie's riveting HALO jump sequence, which he performed a staggering 106 times in order to secure the perfect take.