Tom Cruise‘s payday for performing a death-defying stunt at the 2024 Paris Olympics closing ceremony may have been his lowest yet, as the superstar wasn’t paid anything at all.
The Mission: Impossible actor’s stunt saw him jump from the top of the Stade de France into the stadium where he was handed the Olympic flag by decorated gymnast Simone Biles and Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass.
After retrieving the flag, Cruise jumped on his motorcycle and a pretaped segment showed the actor riding through Paris, boarding a cargo plane to L.A. and arriving at the iconic Hollywood sign. Cruise’s jaw-dropping stunt was the perfect handover to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
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During a “CNBC x Boardroom: Game Plan” panel in Santa Monica on Tuesday, September 10, LA28 president and chairperson Casey Wasserman shared Cruise’s very reasonable fee for performing in Paris. Confirming that Cruise and his entire team didn’t take a cent for the impressive performance, Wasserman also explained how the stunt came together in the first place.
“The best part of the story is we pitched on a Zoom and the original idea was a person in the stadium as a stunt double,” Wasserman said, via The Hollywood Reporter.
Wasserman and the team assumed the actor would simply participate in a pretaped segment in L.A. and would be too busy to take part in the Olympics closing ceremony, but the Golden Globe winner had other plans.
“About five minutes into the presentation, [Tom Cruise] goes, ‘I’m in. But I’m only doing it if I get to do everything,’” Wasserman explained.
Behind-the-scenes, organizers tried to temper their expectations, believing Cruise would be too busy to actually take part, but he quickly proved them all wrong.
When it came to filming in Los Angeles, Cruise didn’t even let his hectic acting schedule get in the way. “He finished filming Mission: Impossible at 6 p.m. in London, got right on a plane,” Wasserman said. “He landed in L.A. at 4 a.m. and filmed the scene where he pulls onto a military plane.”
Wasserman continued, “In L.A., he does two jumps out of the thing. He didn’t like the first one, so he did a second jump. Then he helicoptered from Palmdale to the Hollywood sign, filmed from 1 until 5 [a.m.], helicoptered to Burbank Airport and flew back to London.”
Basically, once Cruise sets his mind to something, there’s literally no stopping him.
