Tom Cruise in Tokyo: `Gi Joe taught me fearlessness`

When asked by one member of the assembled press about how he dealt with heights - the film features a spectacular leap from the Burg tower in Dubai - Cruise cited a childhood experience as, perhaps, the reason he has no fear of high places.

“I guess I was four years old and I had one of those GI Joe toys, you know the ones with the parachute on their back,” he said.

“I got on roof of my parent’s house, climbed over to the garage, unfurled from my back the parachute I’d made from tied-up bed-sheets and rope, and jumped.

“In the second after leaving the roof I figured what a bad idea it was!”

Director Brad Bird suggested the bump Cruise took to his head had given him a ‘brain injury’... and that from that day his fear of heights was gone.

After the conference, Cruise headed for the Tokyo Sky Tree – the country’s tallest free-standing structure - for one of the four ‘missions’ he hoped to complete whilst in the country.