We feel the need, the need for a barf bag.
“Top Gun” is one of the defining movies of Tom Cruise’s career, but he was apparently hesitant to star in it until a memorable ride in a fighter jet.
Screenwriter Jack Epps Jr. and producer Jerry Bruckheimer told The Guardian that they had a group of U.S. Navy pilots took Cruise for a spin before he signed on.
Epps recalled, “They look at him and they don’t know who Tom Cruise is. They do what they like to do: They took him up, they shook him around, he barfed on himself, and he came out and said, ‘I love this.’ From that moment, he was on.”
Bruckheimer added he personally connected Cruise with the pilots, saying, “We couldn’t quite get him to commit [to the movie], so I arranged for him to fly with the Blue Angels in El Centro, California.”
He also noted that Cruise didn’t look like a clean-cut movie star at the time because he had longer hair from his previous movie, “Legend.” “He had long hair and a ponytail, and they saw this guy walk up and they said, ‘We’ll get this hippy a real ride.'”
“They sure did,” Bruckheimer continued, “and he got out of the plane, walked to a phone booth, because there were no cell phones then, called me up, said, ‘I’m in.'”
And thank goodness he was, “Top Gun” went on to be a major hit, becoming the highest grossing film of 1986 domestically and worldwide.
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