Tom Cruise Took Pandemic Social Distancing Real Seriously: 'Do That Again and You're Gone!'
Tom Cruise and his Mission: Impossible crew met the coronavirus pandemic on the set of Dead Reckoning, and the actor almost fired a colleague because of the stress.
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part I is hitting the theaters tomorrow, on April 12, 2023. However, it started shooting all the way back in 2020, and the timing couldn’t have been more terrible: the team gathered up to work on the movie just as the global pandemic started. This, of course, affected the production in many ways.
At this point, there’s no secret that the coronavirus pandemic seriously postponed the release of Dead Reckoning: the production got halted seven (!) times, and combined, these shifts added up to the additional $100M spent on the film, bringing its production costs from the initially planned $190M all the way up to $290M.
Even without that insane cost increase, the pandemic slowed the process significantly. Tom Cruise was insisting on the filming crew following all the precautionary rules on the set, including social distancing, which made any interactions way more complicated.
The actor didn’t care about that, though, as he wanted his colleagues to stay safe. One time, when someone failed to follow the social distancing rules, Cruise was furious. His co-star Simon Pegg recalls the incident when the actor got pissed off and told the crew member that broke the rules, “Do that again and you’re gone!”
The pandemic was a massive stress for Tom Cruise altogether. The actor’s a famous protector of cinema, and he wants the industry to thrive — and with the coronavirus and the dangers and restrictions it brought, Cruise was concerned that cinema was not going to make it through… So he took it upon himself to save it.
“Everything that Tom cares about, in terms of his job, was at stake due to the pandemic. For him, there was a danger this virus could wipe cinema off the face of the Earth,” shared Simon Pegg who plays Benji Dunn in the Mission: Impossible franchise.
It’s easy to see why Cruise was so stressed over the pandemic, to be honest; we all were. The only difference is that Tom kept doing great movies to entertain all of us folks back home while also keeping his team as safe as he could back then.
Source: The Times