We’ve heard a lot about the ankle-breaking on-set accident that knocked Tom Cruise off the set of Mission: Impossible—Fallout (formerly Mission: Impossible 6) for a few months; Cruise’s thrill-seeker penchant for doing his own stunts is well-documented, and the accident ultimately forced filming on the movie to go on hiatus. We’ve even seen footage of the stunt, which made its way onto the internet shortly after the incident occurred. But we’d never seen it from a truly ankle-based point of view, rendered in loving slow-motion, the better to pinpoint the exact moment that Cruise’s ankle snaps. Until now.
Cruise—along with the rest of the film’s leads, including a very squeamish Simon Pegg—went on The Graham Norton Show this week to promote the film, and he brought along multiple angles of the footage in question. Which is to say, he brought along slow-motion footage of his own ankle snapping, and it’s, ya know, pretty gross.
But also: You kind of want to see it, right? (That was Rebecca Ferguson’s response, loudly yelling “Do it again!” as soon as the footage in question rolled.) As Norton and Cruise point out, the actually gut-churning bit of the moment isn’t when Cruise’s chest hits the building—that was apparently just the stunt, as designed—but when his ankle bends up in a way ankles weren’t meant to do. Woof.
