Tom Cruise’s Jerry McGuire co-star Beau Bridges thinks the 63-year-old actor is getting better and better with age.
Bridges, who co-starred with Cruise in the ’90s romantic comedy, attended the Matlock For Your Consider event last week and told People magazine that he was “so grateful to have worked with him.” “He’s a great actor and he’s gotten even better as he’s gotten older. I mean, he’s still doing crazy stunts and stuff. Yeah. And I like working with him. I thought he was great.”
Bridges isn’t the only actor who has thoughts about Cruise’s legendary stunts.
Earlier this year, Ethan Hawke revealed he was growing “angry” with Cruise, explaining that the Mission: Impossible star’s high-risk stunt work had changed what audiences and studios expected from actors across Hollywood.
“Tom Cruise has completely changed what is expected of an actor,” Hawke told Variety at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival in February. “Somewhere in my heart I’ve been angry for years because using a stunt team makes everyone feel like they’re somehow inferior.”
Cruise, who returns with Top Gun 3, has never appeared in a superhero movie for Marvel, DC or any other comic book series, but he has solidified his status as an action movie icon by performing increasingly dangerous real-world stunts in blockbuster series like Mission: Impossible, Top Gun and Jack Reacher.
Last year, Cruise nearly broke his hip during a stunt for Mission: Impossible.
In bonus content for the film’s digital release, Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie detailed one of the film’s most harrowing scenes, a high-altitude biplane battle between the actor’s character Ethan Hunt and Gabriel, played by Esai Morales.
The scene showed Ethan clinging to the wing mid-air, jumping from one plane to another.
“Oh, my back almost broke,” Cruise said, according to Entertainment Weekly.
“You’re talking about a lot of pain here,” McCulley chimed in.
The video clip showed Cruise’s character holding on to his seat belt for dear life as the plane flipped over.
“Now look at this, what we haven’t talked about yet while holding this belt,” McCurry explained, to which Cruz said, “Oh my god, that was brutal.”
The director continued to explain. “This separated Tom’s knuckles from the force, so by the end of this sequence your hand was completely swollen. Oh my god, it was so painful to watch.”
During the intense scene, Cruise’s character is forced to crash into the side of a plane. Recalling the pain, the Hollywood actor said: “Oh, that was brutal. That blow, that was hard.”
McCurry joked, “And you improvised and did that, so thank you so much. You were like, ‘I think you’re going to need that,’ and I was like, ‘I didn’t ask you to do that.'”
