Tom Cruise Refused to Kick Pom Klementieff in the Stomach During ‘Mission: Impossible 7’ Fight: ‘I Kept Telling Him to Just Kick Me’
Tom Cruise will ride a motorcycle off the edge of a cliff, but kicking a co-star is apparently where he draws the line. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” co-star Pom Klementieff said she practically begged him to kick her in the stomach for real while they were filming a fight scene. Cruise refused to do so.
“I kept telling him to just kick me here,” Klementieff said while pointing to her stomach. “I was squeezing abs. [I said], ‘You can just go for it.’ He was like ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ I was like, ‘But it’s going to help me!’ But he wouldn’t do it.”
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Klementieff, best known for playing Mantis in James Gunn’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies and the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe, is joining the “Mission: Impossible” franchise in its seventh installment as Paris, a dangerous hench-woman with ties to the film’s villain, played by Esai Morales. The actor described Paris as “very, very, very much a chaotic element in the story.”
“It doesn’t matter how deep in the background she is, you’re going to be watching her at all times and wondering what she’s going to do,” Klementieff said. “[She] destroys everything in her path. She’s a rebel, she’s a killer, she’s extremely skilled and quite lonely too.”
While Cruise refused to kick Klementieff in the stomach, he did start filming “Dead Reckoning” by riding a motorcycle off the edge of a cliff. The stunt marked the most dangerous one of Cruise’s career thus far. The actor recently told Entertainment Tonight that he wanted to film the stunt on the first day of filming so that his cast and crew would know if rewrites were in order because he didn’t survive.
“Well we know either we will continue with the film or we’re not. Let’s know day one!” Cruise said. “Let us know day one what is going to happen: Do we all continue or is it a major rewrite?”
“I was training and I was ready,” Cruise added. “You have to be razor sharp when you’re doing something like that. It was very important as we were prepping the film that it was actually the first thing. I don’t want to drop that and go shoot other things and have my mind somewhere else. Everyone was prepped. Let’s just get it done.”
“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” opens in theaters July 12 from Paramount Pictures.
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