Unbelievable footage shows Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible stunt before and after special effects

Unbelievable footage shows behind the scenes of one of Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible stunts, which saw him clinging onto an aeroplane in mid-air.

Cruise, 61, is known to get pretty hands-on with his stunts, rather than relying on a gang of body doubles to do the work for him.

While you’d assume there would be a line he wouldn’t be willing to cross, it seems like the A-lister is more than happy to go all guns blazing.

A scene in 2015’s Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation saw his iconic character Ethan Hunt clinging onto the side of a giant cargo plane as it whizzed through the air.

To get the shot, the filmmakers did enlist a little help from special effects – but probably not as much as you might expect.\

Paramount

A featurette from the film showed Cruise literally hanging off the side of the plane as it went into the air.

“Why do the stunts look real?” the featurette asks, before answering its own question: “Because they ARE real.”

Indeed, Cruise said: “I couldn’t sleep the night before, and then came the day. I was like, ‘Okay, that’s really gonna happen.”

He added: “If something went wrong, I can’t get into the airplane until we land.”

Visual Effects Supervisor David Vickery admitted he thought it would be a ‘one take’ job, but that Cruise gave it a go no fewer than EIGHT times.

And here’s the finished scene, after a little help from visual effects:

Paramount

Admittedly, it’s quite hard to tell what they’ve even had to change, as the before and after look so similar - can you see the difference?

Yup, it’s just the harness and cord holding Cruise that have been edited out the shot, which isn’t exactly much given the ambitiousness of the scene.

Paramount

In the featurette, Cruise admitted he was ‘actually scared s**tless’ as he felt the force of the wind hit him, but thankfully it paid off in the end – even if he had to go again for another seven takes to get what they needed.

Speaking to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon back in 2015, he said on the first take it took ‘everything’ to keep his feet on the steps.

“I was almost slapped against the fuselage going down the runway so fast,” he said.

“It was a little intense!”