The actress stood on a biplane mid-air like Cruise’s Ethan Hunt in “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.”

Sydney Sweeney tells Tom Cruise to ‘watch out’ as she channels *Mission: Impossible in her own *wing-walking stunt

The actress stood on a biplane mid-air like Cruise’s Ethan Hunt in “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.”

By Marina Watts

Marina Watts

Marina Watts is a news writer for with seven years experience covering entertainment, pop culture and celebrity news. Her previous work appears in PEOPLE, Bustle and Newsweek.

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August 24, 2026 5:32 p.m. ET

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Sydney Sweeney; Tom Cruise in ‘Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning’. Credit:

Sydney Sweeney/Instagram; Paramount

- Sydney Sweeney has a message for Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt.

- The *Euphoria *actress stood on an in-flight biplane for a ride that included loops and flipping upside-down, rivaling Cruise in *Mission: Impossible*.

- Cruise famously performs his own stunts, including in the biplane scene in *Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning*.

Sydney Sweeney is giving Tom Cruise a run for his money.

The *Euphoria** *actress posted a video on Instagram of her standing on top of an in-flight biplane performing a wing-walking stunt à la Cruise’s Ethan Hunt. Sweeney balances on the plane, doing her version of a stunt Cruise perfected for *Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning*, while holding a camera to capture the exciting ride.

For the stunt, Sweeney was strapped to the plane, wore goggles and a vest. The biplane flipped upside-down at one point and flew in loops. “watch out tom cruise,” she captioned the clip.

Though Cruise has been quiet since the video dropped, the Instagram account from another franchise he stars in, *Top Gun*, commented, “Feel the need for speed.”

Cruise previously performed a stunt similar to Sweeney’s in the 2025 installment of the *Mission: Impossible *franchise. In the scene, Cruise — who famously insists on performing his own stunts — dangles from the side of a biplane before jumping onto another biplane, all in midair.

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The *Top Gun* star performed the stunt on an 80-year-old Stearman biplane that traveled a cool 140 mph at 8,000 feet in the air and had wanted to do something like that for years.

“Few things inspire me quite like an aerial sequence,” Cruise said in a *Mission Impossible — The Final Reckoning* behind-the-scenes clip.

“Since I was a kid I always wanted to do wing-walking. I saw an old black and white film. I was like man, what would it be like to do that?” He said it was a “challenge” to “give the audience something incredibly unique, yet also classic” with this particular stunt — but he did it.

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“It’s never the easy road,” Cruise told *Empire** *in 2023 about performing his own stunts. “I have a responsibility to audiences, the studio, my crew, my cast and industry. We can’t compromise just because all of these things happened. I can’t compromise the storytelling.”

Longtime *Mission: Impossible** *writer-director Christopher McQuarrie spoke about the difficulty performing this stunt, which they filmed in South Africa during its colder months. While on the biplane, Cruise had no radio, and even the subtlest of temperature changes could have sent him into hypothermia.

“The wind is hitting him not only at the speed that the plane is flying but the wind coming off the propeller. It’s hitting him at well over a hundred-plus miles an hour,” he told *GQ*.

“There were times when Tom would have to lay down on the wing to rest between takes,” McQuarrie added. “You can’t tell if he’s conscious or not. And unless Tom pats the top of his head”—their hand signal for stop —“it’s like, keep rolling.”

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