Although Cruise is completely jazzed about the forthcoming sequel to Top Gun, he still remembers some of the insane prep work that went into portraying a "Maverick" fighter pilot in the original. "We did 9.5 Gs, very hard on my body," he recalled during a visit to Jimmy Kimmel Live. "I had a vomit bag right here, so in between takes I leaned down to quickly empty my guts in the bag. The second I did that, he pulls up. My head was literally on the ground from the pressure. I was pressed on the floor, holding my vomit. I kept going 'Bozo! Bozo!' I was choking, and he just kept pulling up and up."

Indeed, the stunt work on Top Gun was so intense that it cost one pilot his life, and Cruise was almost a casualty too. As co-star Barry Tubb told The New York Post, "Cruise came as close to dying as anybody on a set I've ever seen." While Cruise was filmed cradling co-star Anthony Edwards' body in the water after Edwards' character "Goose" perished in the film, his very real parachute began taking on water at an alarming rate. "They were refilling the camera or something, and luckily one of the frogmen in the chopper saw his chute ballooning out. He jumped in and cut Cruise loose right before he sank. They would have never found him. He would have been at the bottom of the ocean."