Tom Cruise Scales World's Tallest Building For 'Mission: Impossible' Sequel

Tom Cruise is many things. Afraid of heights is not one of them.

The 48-year-old actor has long insisted on performing his own stunts for his high-octane action movies, famously scaling the face of a mountain in Sydney, Australia, for the opening sequence of "Mission: Impossible II." But that dangerous stunt has nothing on Cruise's latest feat in "Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol," the fourth entry in the espionage series. In round four, Cruise is trading in a mountain for the tallest skyscraper in the world.

Photos have surfaced of Cruise hanging on the side of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai, which stands as the world's tallest building at 2,717 feet. Cruise, reprising his famous role as super-spy extraordinaire Ethan Hunt, filmed his scenes along with another unidentified actor, reportedly leaping over the man during a chase sequence that involves a helicopter hovering a mere ten feet from Burj Khalifa.

Cruise's deadly stunt was surprising, to say the least — one can only imagine what onlookers must have been thinking watching the actor run along the top of the impossibly tall building — but it's not as if he didn't warn anybody about it. At a press conference last week, Cruise informed attendees that he would be "spending many days [and] many hours on the side of this building. I can't give details, but I will be up there."

The actor's spokeswoman added: "Tom has been preparing for the stunt for some time. He believes if he performs the stunts himself, the audience believes more in his character."

Well, if nothing else, Cruise's latest stunt just proves that no mission is truly impossible.

Check out everything we've got on "Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol."

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