There's no slowing down Ethan Hunt and, by extension, one Tom Cruise. The 60-year-old action star opened up to ET's Rachel Smith when asked if it's at all feasible that the senior field agent for the elite covert operations agency, Impossible Mission Force (IMF), will soon hang up his parachute and running shoes.
ET was the only American outlet at the U.K. premiere of Mission: Impossible -- Dead Reckoning Part One, and it was there at Leicester Square in London where Cruise pondered the question ahead of the franchise's seventh installment hitting theaters July 12 and the eighth installment (Dead Reckoning Part Two) slated for a June 2024 release.
"You know, I can't tell you right now," Cruise tells ET. "I want to enjoy this moment right now, and it's Part One and Part 2. This is a big action-adventure movie for everyone and I look forward to seeing it."
If there's no slowing down Cruise, then by extension that also should include Dead Reckoning producer and director Christopher McQuarrie, who entered the franchise as director of 2015's Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation and 2018's Mission: Impossible -- Fallout, on which he also served as the screenwriter.
"We're just one constant story that love talking about movies and stories and action and stories and more stories and movies and more movies," said Cruise when asked his partnership with McQuarrie.
Earlier this week, Cruise sat down with ET in Rome to preview the upcoming action flick, and he shared an interesting fact about the production: the most dangerous stunt of his career -- a motorcycle jump off of a cliff into a base jump -- was the first scene filmed for Dead Reckoning Part One.
"Well, we know either we're gonna continue with the film or we're not," Cruise said with a laugh of planning the death-defying stunt. "Let's know day one... Do we all continue, or is it a major rewrite?"
In all seriousness, the actor added, it all came down to focus. "It was years preparing. I mean, I've been riding motorcycles since I was a little kid, raced cars and spent a lot of time just with aerobatics, airplanes, helicopters and parachutes... It all kind of came to that moment."
Cruise has undoubtedly etched his name in Hollywood lore with one epic movie after another. Some of his hits include Top Gun, Jerry Maguire, Risky Business and A Few Good Men -- just to name a few. Those films have produced some very iconic movie quotes ("Show. Me. The. Money," anyone?) so it had us wondering: of all his classic films, which one line do fans quote the most?
"You know, it's interesting. There's a lot from my whole career that there's not just one they say," Cruise says. "It's really interesting and fun because some of these people I've seen for decades and they'll quote different lines; a bunch of different lines."
Somewhere, Lt. Daniel Kaffee wants to jump in and shout, "I want the truth!"
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