Tom Cruise refused to kick his co-star Pom Klementieff while filming a fight scene for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.
In the seventh film in the Mission: Impossible franchise, Cruise joins forces with Avengers star Hayley Atwell to track down a terrifying new weapon that threatens humanity.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Klementieff recalled a time from the shoot when Cruise refused to perform a stunt in which he was required to kick his co-star in the stomach.
“I kept telling him to just kick me,” the actor said. “I was squeezing abs. [I said], ‘You can just go for it.’ He was like ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ I was like, ‘But it’s going to help me!’ But he wouldn’t do it.”
Klementieff is cast as Paris – a partner of main villain Gabriel played by Esai Morales – in the new film.
The stomach kick stunt comes during her fight with Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt.
Earlier this week, Cruise revealed the reason why he shot the film’s most dangerous stunt on the first day of production.
Tom Cruise in ‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’— (Paramount/Skydance)
In the scene, Ethan Hunt rides a motorcycle off a cliff before pulling a parachute and drifting off to safety.
Explaining the reason behind the scene being shot on the first day, Cruise said: “Well, we know either we will continue with the film or we’re not. Let’s know day one!”
“Let us know day one what is going to happen: Do we all continue or is it a major rewrite?” he told Entertainment Weekly.
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“I was training and I was ready,” the actor added. “You have to be razor sharp when you’re doing something like that. It was very important as we were prepping the film that it was actually the first thing. I don’t want to drop that and go shoot other things and have my mind somewhere else. Everyone was prepped. Let’s just get it done.”
In a recent interview with Empire magazine, Dead Reckoning director Christopher McQuarrie further explained: “Doing that on day one gave us all the time in the world to understand why he [Ethan] was doing what he was doing.
“If we sat around and tried to figure out these movies the old-fashioned way, you’d never find it, simply because it’s such a living, breathing thing.”
