Tom Cruise ‘Working Diligently’ on His Next Movie Shot in Space: ‘We’ll See Where We Go’

Tom Cruise is still preparing to boldly go where no actor has gone before.

He and his “Edge of Tomorrow” director Doug Liman are set to film a movie in space and make Cruise the first civilian to perform a spacewalk. Universal is backing the film, which has a budget of around $200 million.

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When asked about his space-set movie at the “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” premiere in New York on Monday, Cruise said he didn’t have a production start date set, but, “We’ve been working on it diligently and we’ll see where we go.”

Of course, Cruise still needs to finish making “Dead Reckoning Part Two,” the potential finale of his “Mission: Impossible” series, before he can plot his next movie. Writer and director Christopher McQuarrie, who’s overseeing both “Dead Reckoning” movies, said he and Cruise are getting right back to work on “Part Two” as soon as the “Part One” press tour ends.

“We finish this tour, and on our way back to the U.K. we stop to scout along the way. We hit the ground running as soon as we get back,” McQuarrie told Variety. “I get two days of vacation between here and Tokyo and I’m back on.”

The latest “Mission: Impossible” film, which opens in theaters Wednesday, pits Cruise’s IMF agent Ethan Hunt against a mysterious villain from his past, and reunites him with allies Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson).

But the greatest draw of any “Mission: Impossible” movie is, of course, the stunts, and “Dead Reckoning Part One” doesn’t disappoint. In the film, Cruise drives a motorcycle off a massive cliff and parachutes safely down to the ground. When asked about that morning on set, Cruise said it was just a “usual day.”

“I keep things pretty calm, nothing unusual. The usual day for me,” he told Variety. “We wake up, and I remember that morning McQuarrie and I came to set, and normally we’re talking about story and the characters, just keep it real casual — as casual as possible. We know what’s happening. I remember getting there in the morning and the ramp was ice. You can see in the EPK as I’m jumping out of the helicopter to test the wind down there, they’re cleaning the ramp of ice. You just go through it nice and easy, no changes.”

Pegg, who has starred opposite Cruise in five “Mission: Impossible” films so far, said the one-of-a-kind action star carried “cinema itself” on his shoulders while making “Dead Reckoning Part One” during the pandemic.

“I’m very driven, I am ambitious, I care deeply about my job, but I don’t have cinema itself on my shoulders,” Pegg told Variety. “I feel like Tom, particularly during the making of this movie, felt like that. I felt like he was facing an existential crisis in the form of the pandemic, and he just wouldn’t be cared by it. I don’t know if I have it in me to do what he does, I literally don’t. There’s a reason why he’s the only one who does this stuff. There isn’t an actor working who does what he does.”

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