Tom Cruise makes an impression on his co-star Colin Farrell on the first day of filming Minority Report and the latter hasn’t been the same since.

For Tom Cruise fanatics, jumping off cliffs and dangling from the side of a Boeing aircraft are an everyday occurrence. The actor’s interest in performing death-defying stunts has only increased with time and each Mission: Impossible film. However, when the franchise took off in 1996, later gaining momentum in the early Aughts, little did the fans (and other interested parties) know what lay in store for them.

Cruise’s Mission: Impossible franchise did a wonderful job in adapting the 1966 series of the same name. In fact, the high-octane entertainment delivered by Tom Cruise and his team has become so celebrated in pop culture that the adaptations have far surpassed the original work. However, such progress in a saturated genre like action thriller has its own set of dissidents.

Not Everyone Agrees With Tom Cruise’s Methods

One might argue that there is a method behind every madness, but when it comes to Tom Cruise, all bets are off. Colin Farrell knew that when he first laid eyes on the movie star on the sets of Steven Spielberg’s 2002 sci-fi film, Minority Report. Speaking about their first encounter, Farrell claimed:

I was 24 or 25 and it was my third or fourth film, and I was just going, ‘What the hell?’ You know, he’s very competitive and very physically engaged. I remember him walking on the set and screaming, ‘Are we making an action movie? Then why don’t I hear action?’

The stories about Tom Cruise’s highly enthusiastic, overzealous, and competitive streak are well known among the industry actors. From Matt Damon to Henry Cavill, almost every actor has a memorable encounter with Cruise that would make for amazing campfire stories.

However, when it comes to his high-risk, high-reward stunt filmography, not everyone can relate to the actor’s methods. Although his Mission: Impossible films are widely praised and his death-defying stunts get entrenched in pop culture lore, a closer inspection of Cruise’s love for pulling off these increasingly neck-breaking stunts by himself poses a dangerous question about his psyche.

Colin Farrell Lends His Two Cents on Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One [Credit: Paramount Pictures]

Despite being acquainted first-hand with Tom Cruise and his adrenaline-infused lifestyle, Colin Farrell still had a difficult time coming to terms with a few of the actor’s stunts in the Mission: Impossible franchise. In a 2016 Role Recall interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Farrell revealed his sentiments about Cruise endangering his own neck for his movies:

Did you see the stunts he did on Mission: Impossible where he’s holding onto the side of the plane? I mean, that’s mental illness. That’s not bravery. I mean, that’s mad.

Farrell would not be entirely in the wrong to say that about Tom Cruise. Despite his faults and shortcomings, the one area where Cruise severely fails to slack off lies in his love for extreme sports. From flying fighter jets to commercial planes, motorcycles, boats, and helicopters, owning licenses for skydiving, and selling real estate properties, there is no end to the things that the actor is qualified in.

As for his Mission: Impossible stunts, some would shock even Colin Farrell despite his assumptions about the actor’s madness. Aside from the cliff jump in Dead Reckoning, the highly risky HALO jump (High Altitude Low Opening) in Fallout requires a skydiver to exit the aircraft at a higher altitude than normal and deploy their parachutes at a lower altitude than the accepted range. Needless to say, Cruise performed the task with perfection, and more times than once to get the shot right.

As for the promotional press tour of his seventh Mission: Impossible film, Tom Cruise left no expenses spared, including dangling from a helicopter without harnesses while filming a message for the fans to see his movie in the theaters. Colin Farrell would be positively livid after that latest stunt.