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Sure, it looked fun to film that breathtaking action-drama Top Gun: Maverick, what with all of the shirtless beach football games, “Great Balls of Fire” piano sing-alongs and glorious mustaches. But star Miles Teller said that getting into the “danger zone” for the high-flying sequel was actually dangerous.
During an interview with LADbible, the actor—who plays Lieutenant Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, a pilot trainee and the son of Maverick’s late BFF Nick “Goose” and Carol Bradshaw, portrayed by Anthony Edwards and Meg Ryan in the original Top Gun movie—discussed how Maverick star Tom Cruise put the cast newcomers through the ringer during their pilot training for the film. It got to the point that Teller actually thought he was “going to die” while filming one specific heart-pounding sequence:
I definitely had a moment where I thought I was going to die. There was a sequence where we were heading straight towards the ground and you do what’s called a max G pull-up. You’re heading down and at the last second you yank up, and it’s really tough for the pilot. It’s something they train in all the time, but it was the first time we’d done a maneuver like that and I completely stopped acting. I looked at the ground and thought this wasn’t going to end well for me.
Despite feeling a “healthy bit of fear,” Teller was proud that he was one of the few cast members who didn’t have to grab a barf bag mid-flight during the production. (His co-star Lewis Pullman previously revealed that he would throw up during the movie’s high-octane jet stunts.) Miles added:
I think when there’s that much adrenaline and a healthy bit of fear, I was able to hold it down. I guess that’s a secret skill I have.
And while the 37-year-old star is more than happy to “have a perfectly good stunt guy” to tackle those really difficult movie maneuvers, he does praise actors like Cruise who do their own stunt work and offer up an “elevated” level of immersion for the viewer:
I think the reason why Tom does this stuff is because when the audience knows that it’s really you and there’s no cutaways, that the level of immersion you get as a viewer, as a voyeur, is elevated. So I’m open to it, but also, I’ve got injured on some films doing some weird things, and when you have a perfectly good stunt guy, I don’t want to put him out of a job, you know? That’s just me being an honest guy.
Given how much of a box office behemoth Top Gun: Maverick was in 2022, a third film is unsurprisingly in the works, with Tom Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell as well as Miles Teller and Glen Powell all expected to return. And there will undoubtedly be even more adrenaline-pumping plane action to come.
In the meantime, you can watch Miles Teller and the rest of the new recruits in Top Gun: Maverick, available to stream with a Paramount Plus subscription.