Tom Cruise's greatest stunt?

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FEATURE 

🪂 The Man Behind Mission: Impossible's Insane Skydiving Stunts

How a military parachutist became Hollywood's go-to skydiving expert:

While most of us try to stay inside airplanes, Allan Hewitt has spent decades figuring out the best ways to exit them. From the British military's elite Red Devils display team to coordinating some of Hollywood's most jaw-dropping aerial stunts, he's logged over 8,000 jumps and counting.

But here's the wild part: he never planned to work in movies at all. "I was dragged into the industry. I didn't choose it," Hewitt explains. "There was no 'I want to be a stunt coordinator.'"

1. The Accidental Stuntman. When Hewitt took a group of stuntmen to California for skydiving training, he had no idea one of them was Simon Crane, one of Hollywood's biggest stunt coordinators. That chance encounter led to a job offer on a James Bond film - which he initially turned down.

"I actually said no, I've got too much work on selling parachutes and maintaining, servicing parachutes," Hewitt recalls. But Crane persisted, sending a car to pick him up and promising just one hour of his time. "By the end of the day, he gave me the VIP treatment, showed me the storyboard which was all hand-drawn at this time, page by page and laid out over a wall... and he said, 'Do you want the job?'"

2. From Bond to Batman. After designing powered parachute sequences for The World Is Not Enough, Hewitt's reputation grew. For Batman Begins, his team spent three months filming HALO jumps with massive IMAX cameras. "The camera was this wide, it was that tall, and it was that fat," he describes. "We had 45 seconds of film each time and then had to get sent off for developing." Despite capturing "amazing" footage, it never made the final cut due to political complications in Hong Kong.

3. When Mission: Impossible - Fallout came calling, Cruise personally interviewed Hewitt. After a 20-minute interview discussing HALO jumps, Cruise turned to the stunt coordinator and said, "Right, he's hired. I like your choice."

"He's a workaholic," Hewitt says of Cruise. "He's focused on the job. He loves the stunt work... He's the easiest person I've ever taught to do anything in freefall. We're both the same age, he listens... not like a young student you're teaching, and he actually did exactly as we briefed. He progressed really fast."

4. What sets Hewitt apart isn't just skydiving skills - it's his obsession with safety and equipment innovation. For Fallout's HALO sequence, every detail mattered. The director wanted Cruise's face visible, creating a unique challenge. "I actually spent three months designing a full-faced HALO helmet where you can see Tom's face," Hewitt explains. "And then the art department said we want lights inside it. So I was like, you know, oxygen at 25,000 feet with electrics in the helmets... we've not got a good thing going here."

5. The Latest Challenge. For Dead Reckoning Part One, Hewitt helped Cruise achieve the impossible again - riding a motorcycle off a cliff before deploying a parachute. "Tom doesn't want to do anything that anybody else has done," Hewitt explains.

And for the upcoming Dead Reckoning Part Two? Hewitt can barely contain his excitement:

"The skill level to do that was far higher than riding a bike off a cliff or doing a HALO jump... If I had to choose a skydiver to do that stunt, I'd pick somebody with 10 to 12,000 skydives just to start with. Tom at that point had 500 skydives. But his skill level was good. He's focused... When the film comes out, I'm pretty sure the audience is going to be blown away." 🎬

Go Deeper:

• Here’s a BTS look at the prep for the HALO jump (YouTube).

• Here’s the most recent post from Tom Cruise about the new stunt (X).

• This interview comes from the upcoming stuntman doc, Daredevil Society.

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