Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Words by JANE CROWTHER

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As he prepares to release his eighth (and final?) instalment of the Mission: Impossible series, Tom Cruise brings the action to Cannes.

Just as he brought Top Gun: Maverick to Cannes in 2022, the world’s biggest movie star returned to the Croisette this year to deliver his eighth Mission: Impossible film, The Final Reckoning, to the Palais. Stopping to sign autographs and greet fans on the red carpet (where an acapella group sang the film’s theme tune), Cruise’s latest actioner garnered a 6 minute standing ovation when it premiered. 

Earlier in the day he made an unbilled appearance at a Q&A with Mission director Christopher McQuarrie who credited the actor/producer with keeping him in the film business. Cruise’s enthusiasm for cinema, McQuarrie told the crowd, was a turning point. ‘When I met him, I was going to quit the business.’ The duo have made 11 films together since and have developed a shorthand together figuratively, and on the latest film, literally – as Cruise completed death defying stunts while underwater in a groundbreaking submarine set as well as dangling from the wings of a vintage bi-plane over South Africa’s Drakensberg Mountains.

Final Reckoning rejoins the narrative a few months after the action of Dead Reckoning as Cruise’s Ethan Hunt comes to terms with losses from their team and the fallout of an agent called Gabriel (Esai Morales) trying to control an AI programme called ‘the entity’. The team must reassemble to find the source code for the AI in an attempt to stop it from triggering all-out global nuclear war. Known for completing his stunts himself, Cruise is battered in a rolling submarine on the ocean floor and fights negative Gs and incredible physical strain on his body on the wings of a vintage Boeing Stearman. During their joint on-stage chat, McQuarrie admitted that at one point during filming he didn’t know if the actor was conscious or not during a take, fearing for his life as the pilot could not land the plane with him on the wing. Luckily, Cruise rallied, climbed to the cockpit and the plane and performer landed safely. 

Not such worries at the Carlton hotel on the Croisette when Greg Williams photographed Cruise balancing on a chair in his suite before walking the red carpet…