The 55-year-old actor truly pushed his limits while shooting the film.
Tom Cruise truly pushed his limits while filming Mission: Impossible - Fallout.
The 55-year-old actor is used to performing a variety of unbelievable, death-defying stunts for his role as Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible franchise, but this time, he went a little too far -- literally. While jumping off a roof for the movie, Cruise stuck his foot out "a hair too long" and ended up breaking his ankle.
"First of all, I was pissed," he exclusively told ET's Carly Steel at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Wednesday, where he received the prestigious Will Rogers Pioneer of the Year Award. "I was really angry."
"[My foot was out] just a split second too long, and I fractured the talus, and I knew instantly. I said, 'It's broken,'" Cruise recalled.
The stunt gone wrong halted production for nine weeks -- even though doctors expected the actor's recovery to take nine months. "I was nervous about it," he confessed. "I definitely was... but I really tried to work hard. I worked 10 hours a day on rehab, seven days a week."
"I had all the running left [to do] in the movie, so when you look at the film, I actually have a broken foot," he shared. "[But] the things I do, I do it to entertain people.. I just thought, I'm going to do it no matter what. I'm going to come back and I'll be able to run. I gotta finish this movie and I have release dates and audiences, and I'm going to get it done."
Cruise definitely got it done -- and even put himself through another dangerous stunt while filming the movie's epic helicopter sequence.
"[I was thinking], 'Don't die. Please don't make a mistake, don't make a mistake,'" he admitted. "I'm acting in it also as we're going through it, so I'm performing, but underneath its a very technical move, it's a very risky move."
"The adrenaline was flowing, let me tell [you]," he said. "We were pushing the envelope, I know it."
Speaking of risks, this year marks 35 years since Cruise starred in Risky Business -- but the actor remembers the movie's iconic slide scene "like it was really yesterday."
"We started playing with it, and I just took my pants off and slid across, and the earlier ones I slid from one end to the next because the floor was so polished," he recalled. "So I did that a few times, I tried to stop in the middle. And then I called the prop guy over, [the] set dresser, and said, 'Look, give me some spray,' and I sprayed the floor so that I would slide and then I would stop."
"It got sticky right in the center frame, so that's how we got the opening frame," he revealed.
"As time goes on, you kinda say, 'Oh, look at that,' with Risky Business, with Color of Money or Top Gun and the different roles, and then you just realize, like, all of a sudden it's been almost 40 years since I first started making movies," Cruise said. "When I was doing Taps, I dreamed, if I could just do this for the rest of my life. I want to make movies my whole life, and now it's happening. Now to have spent the greater portion of my life doing this, it's really rewarding."
Mission: Impossible - Fallout hits theaters on July 27.
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