Tom Cruise gives positive update on Top Gun: Maverick sequel

Tom Cruise and the ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ creative team are “thinking and talking about many different stories” for the upcoming sequel.

Tom Cruise has revealed he and the ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ team are “thinking and talking about many different stories” for the sequel.

The 62-year-old actor is set to reprise his role as pilot Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell in the upcoming follow-up to the 2022 blockbuster, and has now shared he and the creative team are currently exploring different avenues of where to take the ‘Top Gun’ story next.

During an appearance on the Australian ‘Today’ show, Cruise said: “Yeah, we’re thinking and talking about many different stories and what could we do and what’s possible.

“It took me 35 years to figure out ‘Top Gun: Maverick’, so all of these things we’re working on, we’re discussing ‘Days of Thunder’ and ‘Top Gun: Maverick’.”

The ‘Mission: Impossible’ star added he was working on “numerous other films” at the moment, including Alejandro Iñárritu’s first English language movie since 2015’s ‘The Revenant’, and other projects with his ‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ director Christopher McQuarrie.

He said: “There’s numerous other films that we’re actively working on right now. I’m always shooting a film, prepping a film, posting a film.

“I just finished a film with Alejandro Iñárritu too, who did ‘The Revenant’, that was an extraordinary experience and [Christopher McQuarrie] and I are always working on several different films.”

‘Top Gun: Maverick’ – which is the legacy sequel to 1986’s ‘Top Gun’ – followed Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell (Cruise) as he trained the next generation of TOPGUN pilots, including Bradley ‘Rooster’ Bradshaw (Miles Teller) Jake ‘Hangman’ Seresin (Glen Powell) and Robert ‘Bob’ Floyd (Lewis Pullman).

As well as introducing a host of new characters, ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ reunited Cruise’s ‘Maverick’ with Tom ‘Iceman’ Kazansky, as portrayed by the late Val Kilmer – who passed away last month at the age of 65 from complications related to pneumonia following a long period of ill health – which Cruise described as a “very special” moment.

Speaking with Sight and Sound magazine, the ‘Jack Reacher’ star said: “To come back all those years later, and it was amazing being on set for ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ because it was like time had not passed. We were laughing and it was joyous.

“And then we started acting and it’s just, you see it … he became ‘Iceman’. The power that this guy has, even not saying anything, to become that character. You see how even the sniff that he gave. He was ‘Iceman’.

“And you saw the dynamic between these friends. It was very special, to say the least, for me personally.

“I just tell people … you take Iceman from the first film and you look at it here, that whole journey, he became ‘Iceman’. And he didn’t even have to speak.

“That’s what he’s able to do. Beautiful, really beautiful. A gift that he had and that he shared with all of us.”

Even so, Kilmer had initially rejected the role of ‘Iceman’ in the original ‘Top Gun’.

Cruise explained: “I felt so grateful that he decided to make the film. We did a lot to get him in the movie. Originally, he just didn’t want to make the movie, ‘I don’t want to be a supporting, I want to star in films.’

“I was calling his agent, and Tony Scott was hunting him down and meeting in an elevator with Val, and he was like, ‘Please, Val, please.’

“You just see what a great actor, charismatic guy he was. And in that scene, what I love about what he did and how he played it, he just knew that tone to hit.”