Screen Rant
Tom Cruise arrives in a helicopter at the San Diego premiere of Top Gun: Maverick in a new video. Cruise first appeared as Naval aviator Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Tony Scott’s Top Gun in 1986. 36 years later, the 59-year-old actor returns in Joesph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick alongside franchise newcomers Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Ed Harris, Monica Barbaro, and Miles Teller as Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw— the son of Nick "Goose" Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards), who died in the original film. Val Kilmer also returns as Tom “Iceman” Kazansky from the original Top Gun.
The sequel picks up over three decades later and sees Maverick still a Captain, having dodged advancement in rank to avoid being grounded. He’s ordered to return to the Fighter Weapons School on a special assignment to train a detachment of Top Gun graduates—which includes Rooster. In real life, Cruise developed a program for his younger Top Gun 2 co-stars, teaching them how to fly in the F/A-18s, handle the Gs, and often work their cameras in the cockpit. Suffice to say, Top Gun: Maverick features an impressive amount of practical aviation stuntwork, with the crew having built brand new cameras to capture the flight sequences properly. Given that fact, of course, its star would show up at the film’s premiere in an aircraft.
Wednesday, Cruise landed in a helicopter on the USS Midway, the iconic Navy aircraft carrier docked in San Diego, before heading to the world premiere of Top Gun: Maverick. While many assumed Cruise piloted the helicopter, which read “Tom Cruise. Top Gun: Maverick,” he later confirmed to ET that he wasn’t behind the controls this time.
Cruise is a certified pilot with hours upon hours of flight experience and has also done many jumps. In Mission: Impossible – Fallout, in addition to piloting a helicopter in an invigorating chase, he also jumped from a plane. Cruise is renowned for performing his death-defying stunts, many of which involve his willingness to get into a cockpit and truly fly on camera (or hang onto the side of a plane as it takes off for Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation).
