When speaking with Empire Magazine, Tom Cruise and producer Jerry Bruckheimer have delved into their upcoming film Top Gun: Maverick, revealing new details and praising the creative process on the long-awaited sequel.
Trying to follow the mega-success of their first collaboration back in 1986 is no easy task, but Cruise said once they started to talk about making a Top Gun sequel, they’d knew it would be unlike anything we’ve seen before.
“We just started talking,” Cruise says. “And I realized that there were things that we could accomplish cinematically. And I started getting excited about this big challenge of, ‘How do we do it?’ So I said to Jerry, ‘I’ll do it if…’ meaning, I’m not going to do the CGI stuff.”
Going off of what the trailers have shown, it’s easy to see why Cruise feels that way. The aerial stunts and sequences are much different than the first time around, says Jerry Bruckheimer: “What’s different about this movie is that [in Top Gun] we put the actors in the F-14s, and we couldn’t use one frame of it, except some stuff on Tom, because they all threw up. It’s hysterical to see their eyes roll back in their heads. So everything was done on a gimbal. But in this movie, Tom wanted to make sure the actors could actually be in the F-18s.”
SEE ALSO: Top Gun: Maverick images show off the sequel’s new recruits
Known for his insane stunt work on the Mission Impossible series, Cruise wanted to make it clear to Paramount what he wanted to do with this film. “I said to the studio, ‘You don’t know how hard this movie’s going to be. No-one’s ever done this before,’” the star laughs. “There’s never been an aerial sequence shot this way. I don’t know if there ever will be again, to be honest.”
After more than thirty years of service as one of the Navy’s top aviators, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is where he belongs, pushing the envelope as a courageous test pilot and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him. When he finds himself training a detachment of Top Gun graduates for a specialized mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen, Maverick encounters Lt. Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), call sign: “Rooster,” the son of Maverick’s late friend and Radar Intercept Officer Lt. Nick Bradshaw, aka “Goose”.
Facing an uncertain future and confronting the ghosts of his past, Maverick is drawn into a confrontation with his own deepest fears, culminating in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those who will be chosen to fly it.
Top Gun: Maverick is set for release on June 26th 2020 and sees returning stars Tom Cruise (Maverick) and Val Kilmer (Iceman) joined in the cast by Jennifer Connolly (American Pastoral), Jon Hamm (Mad Men), Ed Harris (Westworld), Lewis Pullman (Bad Times at the El Royale), Glen Powell (Hidden Figures), Charles Parnell (Transformers: Age of Extinction), Bashir Salahuddin (Glow), Monica Barbaro (The Good Cop), Danny Ramirez (The Gifted), Manny Jacinto (The Good Place), Jay Ellis (Insecure), Kara Wang (Good Trouble), Jack Schumacher (Empire), Greg Tarzan Davis (Chicago P.D.), Jake Picking (Blockers), Raymond Lee (Mozart in the Jungle), Jean Louisa Kelly (Ant-Man) and Lyliana Wray (Strange Angel).
