Tom Cruise "never thought" a 'Top Gun' sequel would happen.

Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise

The 57-year-old actor reprises his role as pilot Peter 'Maverick' Mitchell in the upcoming sequel 'Top Gun: Maverick', 34 years after starring in the original.

However, Tom admits that at first he struggled to envisage making a second movie.

He told Empire: "Everywhere I went, people would be like, 'Do Top Gun', and I'm like, 'Guys, I don't know how to do it.'

"I don't know what the story is. I don't make movies just to make movies. I was like, 'Jerry (Bruckheimer, producer), it's never going to happen'. I honestly never thought I would make it."

The 'Mission: Impossible' star wanted to make the movie cinematically authentic and avoid using CGI.

Tom explained: "We just started talking. And I realised that there were things that we could accomplish cinematically.

"And I started getting excited about this big challenge of, 'How do we do it?' So I said to Jerry, 'I'll do it if...' meaning, I'm not going to do the CGI stuff."

Jerry Bruckheimer also returns to produce the motion picture having served in the same role for the original and has said Tom wanted his co-stars, including Miles Teller and Glen Powell, to experience piloting the planes.

The 76-year-old producer said: "What's different about this movie is that [in the original Top Gun] we put the actors in the F-14s and we couldn't use one frame of it, except some stuff on Tom, because they all threw up.

"It's hysterical to see their eyes roll back in their heads. So everything was done on a gimbal. But in this movie, Tom wanted to make sure the actors could actually be in the F-18s."

Tom added he warned the studio about how challenging the film would be to make.

He remarked: "I said to the studio, 'You don't know how hard this movie's going to be. No-one's ever done this before.' There's never been an aerial sequence shot this way. I don't know if there ever will be again, to be honest."

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