Legendary Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer recently paid some compliments to “Top Gun: Maverick” star Tom Cruise, calling him one of the hardest-working actors in the business.
The 79-year-old movie mogul told Fox News Digital that he’s proud of Cruise’s work ethic while indicating that another “Top Gun” installment wasn’t out of the question.
“There’s nobody like him. Nobody works harder, cares more, or is a better actor than Tom Cruise,” Bruckheimer said while attending the Critics Choice Awards Sunday evening. “We’re very fortunate that he came back to do another ‘Top Gun’ in ‘Maverick’ and made it the worldwide success it’s become.”
The producer went on to discuss the intense preparation that actors underwent to prepare for their “Maverick” roles.
“Our actors went through three months of training in various jets. First in a prop plane then an aerobatic prop then in a jet and finally in an F-18, so they can handle all the G forces that the plane puts on, eight or nine G’s a time,” Bruckheimer told the publication.
“It worked perfectly because our actors in the plane when we actually filmed it was real and that’s amazing,” he continued. “The fact that they withstood those amounts of G’s and gave a great performance on top of it, it made it a worldwide hit.”
The highly anticipated sequel to the 1986 action movie “Top Gun” grossed more than $1.4 billion at the global box office plus more than $690 million domestically, making it one of the highest-grossing movies of all time, as The Daily Wire previously reported.
In December, Cruise sent a special message to fans, thanking them for their support as he jumped out of a helicopter while on location in South Africa filming the upcoming film “Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning.”
Fans are eager to see a follow-up to “Maverick,” but Bruckheimer said while it’s always a possibility, Cruise is focusing on the “Mission: Impossible” franchise for now.
“He’s in the middle of shooting ‘Mission Impossible,’ he’s got a lot of very difficult, hard stunts he’s doing. … It’s not the time to take attention away from what’s important to him right now,” the producer said when asked about the future of “Top Gun.”
But he didn’t rule out the idea entirely.
“We’ll have to wait and see,” he told Fox News over the weekend.
Director Joseph Kosinski also weighed in on the possibility, saying, “Is there another story that is compelling enough that we need to go back? It seems to me at the end of this film that Maverick has some gas left in the tank. He’s not settling down.”