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Friday, November 13, 2026Nov 13

Strapped to flying Airbus, Tom Cruise muses on camera angle

US actor Tom Cruise, center, poses with fans as he arrives for the Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation World Premiere, at the Vienna State Opera in Vienna, Austria, Thursday, July 23, 2015. (AP Photo/Ronald Zak)
US actor Tom Cruise, center, poses with fans as he arrives for the Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation World Premiere, at the Vienna State Opera in Vienna, Austria, Thursday, July 23, 2015. (AP Photo/Ronald Zak)

VIENNA (AP) – Imagine this. You’re strapped to the outside of a flying jetliner, thousands of feet above ground and rapidly rising. What would be going through your head?

“You’re thinking about the lighting, the angle, how’s the shot,” says Tom Cruise or his latest hair-raising stunt in “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.”

“Plus, you want to live through it.”

In Vienna on Thursday for the world premiere of their film, Cruise and other leads in the cast talked to The Associated Press about its making – and how they already miss the months of hard work that went into the fifth in the Mission: Impossible series.

With part of the film playing in the Austrian capital, the choice of Vienna made sense. One of the most suspenseful episodes takes the audience to the city’s ornate opera house where Cruise, as Ethan Hunt, plays a deadly game of hide-and-go seek members of The Syndicate, a dark force bent on destroying the earth – and while they’re at it, killing Austria’s chancellor.