25. "Why do the stunts look real?" the Rogue Nation production posed the question in a 2015 featurette. "Because they are real."
As cinematographer Robert Elswit told The Hollywood Reporter, "There's no digital Tom, and there's no fake plane. He's really strapped to an Airbus."
Not that it doesn't take a village to pull it all off, lately overseen by stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood, who's been with the franchise since Rogue Nation. Visual effects supervisor David Vickery, who makes sure there are no traces of the harness or the many wires and cables involved when Cruise is strapped onto things, noted that they did eight takes with the plane.
But Cruise used to share the burden a bit more. For instance, that was really him (on wires) scaling Utah's Dead Horse Point at the beginning of M:I 2, but he had a climbing double, Ron Kauk, and Keith Campbell, his stunt double for the first two films, did the slip off the overhang.
"[Ron] and Tom got to be quite good friends during the week of shooting," Campbell recalled to UK Climbing in 2000. "Tom has a strong interest in climbing and is really fun to work with: tough, athletic, coordinated and aggressive. Ron worked with him to get him comfortable on the rock and so far off the deck—we were working at the top of the cliff, which is about 600 feet to the talus slope and another 2,000 feet to the river."
Cruise indeed take to climbing, and in 2018's Fallout that's just him saving the day on Norway's Preikestolen, 2,000 feet above a rushing fjord. The shoot lasted three days and supplies had to be flown up by helicopter, "but there are no stunt doubles in any of those shots," McQuarrie told USA Today.