Casey Wasserman Reveals Tom Cruise’s Payday for Death-Defying Olympics Stunt: Nothing

It’s been a month since Tom Cruise stole the present throughout the Paris Olympics closing ceremony, and persons are nonetheless speaking about it. By folks, at the least one particular person (right now) and it’s exactly the man you continue to wish to hear from proper about now: Casey Wasserman.

The mogul, who serves as LA28 president and chairperson, dished some behind-the-scenes secrets and techniques Tuesday afternoon about touchdown Cruise for the show-stopping flip that served to set the stage for what’s to come back when Los Angeles hosts the video games in 4 years. About that efficiency: The Mission: Unimaginable jumped off the Stade du France, landed contained in the stadium, walked via a crowd of followers and accepted the official Olympic flag from Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Simone Biles. He then cruised via Paris on his bike, rode it straight onto a airplane close to the Eiffel Tower, after which reappeared in a pre-recorded phase by skydiving into the hills behind the Hollywood signal.

“It’s amazing how fast he got to L.A., isn’t it?” Wasserman joked throughout a CNBC x Boardroom: Recreation Plan panel at Fairmont Miramar Resort and Bungalows in Santa Monica. The session, titled We Bought Subsequent: LA 2028, featured Wasserman seated alongside Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, LA28 board of administrators member Jessica Alba, Staff USA managing director Grant Hill and moderator Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC’s Squawk Field. Sorkin then requested Wasserman to offer the viewers the backstory of the way it all got here collectively.

“The backstory is that we realized we were producing a 15-minute live TV show, and so I hired who I think is the best person in the world to do that,” defined Wasserman, heaping reward on tremendous producer and dwell TV guru Ben Winston. Wasserman continued by saying that Winston had two concepts after he was employed, one in every of which was Cruise whereas the opposite was making the Olympic rings seem out of the ocean “like a David Blane kind of thing.”

However as soon as they acquired Cruise on Zoom to go over the concept, it shortly turned clear that he was not solely recreation for the phase, he wished to do all his personal stunts within the death-defying spectacle similar to he does within the Mission: Unimaginable franchise.

“The best part of the story is we pitched on a Zoom and the original idea was a person in the stadium as a stunt double,” Wasserman defined. “We’re like, well, there’s no way we’re getting this. We’re going to get four hours of filming time. We’ll do the thing that the L.A. with the Hollywood sign, he’ll hand the thing off and he’s done. Maybe we’ll get the other stuff and the rest will be just a stunt double. About five minutes into the presentation [Tom Cruise] goes, ‘I’m in. But I’m only doing it if I get to do everything.’”

After the Zoom ended, Winston then known as Wasserman. “He says, ‘Don’t get too excited. He loves doing this stuff but when his team realizes how many shooting days it’s going to be and rehearsals, this is never happening. I’m telling you I got it, but it’s never happening.’ Sure enough, every step of the way, he got more involved and more engaged.”

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Winston mentioned the unique plan known as for a balaclava-clad stunt particular person to the heavy lifting, however Cruise once more brushed that apart. “I don’t think there’s anybody like him in the world,” mentioned Winston, who heads up Fulwell 73 Productions. “There is no better collaborator.”

Not solely did he dive headfirst into the phase, Wasserman defined that Cruise — and everybody else on the challenge, for that matter — did all of it for free. It’s a reality made much more spectacular by what was required of Cruise to make it occur. “He finished filming Mission: Impossible at 6 p.m. in London, got right on a plane. He landed in L.A. at 4 a.m., and filmed the scene where he pulls onto a military plane. In L.A., he does two jumps out of the thing. He didn’t like the first one, so he did a second jump. Then he helicoptered from Palmdale to the Hollywood sign, filmed from 1 until 5, helicoptered to Burbank Airport and flew back to London.”

One other enjoyable second from right now’s panel got here when Wasserman mentioned that they have been in a position to pull off the Hollywood signal filming due to a “one of those weird lucky L.A. things.” He was referencing how the cameras which can be all the time streaming the scene across the Hollywood signal simply so occurred to not be on when Cruise was within the neighborhood. “I don’t know what happened, Andrew,” Wasserman quipped. “The cameras didn’t work that day and we were able to pull it off.”

For the document, Hollywood Signal Belief chairman Jeff Zarrinnam confirmed that they have been in on the safety digicam outage. “Even our own cameras, our security cameras were turned off and not recording during this stunt,” Zarrinnam beforehand advised NBC Los Angeles.

Throughout the vigorous panel dialogue, Wasserman additionally saved some reward for Paris and the folks of France. “The French team deserves a lot of credit,” he famous. “They reminded people why people fall in love with the Olympics. … It’s been a long time since you had a really beautiful, high-engaged global city that had the resources and the time and the opportunity to take advantage of what the Olympics can be, and they did it spectacularly. To me, the greatest thing they did was they energized the people of France and those stadiums were full and excited, and you saw the results for the French teams being remarkable.”