Watch the ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Cast’s Ridiculously Intense Flight Training
It is not easy being in a Tom Cruise movie. That dude doesn’t do anything the simple way. So if he’s going to make a sequel to Top Gun, he’s not just going to sit on a green screen in a fake cockpit and lean his head left and right; he’s going to get into a legit fighter jet and fly around at 10 Gs or whatever— and he’s going to make all the other actors in the cast do it too.
The rigorous (one might even say absurd) training regimen needed to prepare for such an endeavor is the subject of a new featurette on the making of Top Gun: Maverick. It shows the sorts of things the new film’s cast — including Miles Teller, Glen Powell, and Monica Barbaro — had to endure in the pre-production process. They had to fly in increasingly fast jets. They had to learn to free themselves from a wreck underwater, which looks really scary. And they even had to learn cinematography, since they’re the only ones in those tiny fighter jet cockpits and had to be able to do work the cameras filming them. Check out what the promotional materials bills as “the most intense film training ever” below.
I don’t know about the most intense training ever, but that definitely does not look fun. Here is the film’s official synopsis:
After more than thirty years of service as one of the Navy’s top aviators, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is where he belongs, pushing the envelope as a courageous test pilot and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him. When he finds himself training a detachment of TOPGUN graduates for a specialized mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen, Maverick encounters Lt. Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), call sign: “Rooster,” the son of Maverick’s late friend and Radar Intercept Officer Lt. Nick Bradshaw, aka “Goose.” acing an uncertain future and confronting the ghosts of his past, Maverick is drawn into a confrontation with his own deepest fears, culminating in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those who will be chosen to fly it.
After years (decades!) of waiting, Top Gun: Maverick opens in theaters on May 27.