Tom Cruise will once again be taking to the sky in Top Gun: Maverick, but at one stage the actor "never thought" the sequel would happen.
Speaking to Empire, Cruise and producer Jerry Bruckheimer opened up about how the project came to be, despite the actor struggling to envisage a new story.
"Everywhere I went, people would be like, 'Do Top Gun', and I'm like, 'Guys, I don't know how to do it'," said Cruise.
"I don't know what the story is. I don't make movies just to make movies. I was like, 'Jerry, it's never going to happen'. I honestly never thought I would make it."
On how it eventually came about, he said: "We just started talking. And I realised that there were things that we could accomplish cinematically.
"And I started getting excited about this big challenge of, 'How do we do it?' So I said to Jerry, 'I'll do it if…' meaning, I'm not going to do the CGI stuff."
As you'd expect of Cruise, he flies his own jet in the movie and takes on some serious G-Force for the aerial action sequences. But this time around, he wanted the rest of the cast to do the same.
"What's different about this movie is that [in the original Top Gun] we put the actors in the F-14s and we couldn't use one frame of it, except some stuff on Tom, because they all threw up," said a laughing Bruckheimer.
"It's hysterical to see their eyes roll back in their heads. So everything was done on a gimbal. But in this movie, Tom wanted to make sure the actors could actually be in the F-18s."
Cruise added: "I said to the studio, 'You don’t know how hard this movie's going to be. No-one's ever done this before.' There's never been an aerial sequence shot this way. I don't know if there ever will be again, to be honest."
Top Gun: Maverick will open in cinemas on June 26, 2020 in the US and July 17, 2020 in the UK.
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