Climbing skyscrapers, hanging from planes and holding his breath underwater for six minutes, Tom Cruise seems to up the ante stunt-wise with every movie, but his latest for drug cartel thriller American Made is just off the charts ridiculous.

Playing Barry Seal, a real life pilot turned CI gunrunner turned cocaine smuggler, Cruise at one point manned a light aircraft for a scene.

That's already quite the healthy and safety risk, but it gets more fraught; allow director Doug Liman (himself a pilot) to explain (via Yahoo):

"It can be pretty hair-raising - flying extremely fast, small airplanes, low to the ground, is a dangerous environment to be in just on its own. Then, in the story, he’s throwing bales of cocaine out of the airplane, loading them up with guns, so every once in a while in this scene he’s got to climb out of the cockpit and go to the back of the airplane to dump the cocaine out.

“I’m flying alongside him in a helicopter filming, and that made a big impression on me – there’s nobody in the cockpit of the plane! Tom has gone to the back of the aircraft, and he’s alone in that airplane. It’s one thing to have Tom Cruise alone in the airplane flying it – that’s already outrageous – now he’s alone and he’s not even in the cockpit so he’s gone beyond. It was already a stunt before he left the cockpit, it was already a serious stunt."

The first trailer for American Made dropped yesterday (above), a potentially more interesting role for Cruise after spending a lot of his recent time in franchises and sci-fi action movies.