Tom Cruise on Sending Cakes to Stars, Skydiving With His Mother

Tom Cruise and Angela Bassett stopped by The Late Late Show on Tuesday (July 24) to promote Mission: Impossible — Fallout.

After discussing Cruise’s traveling gym, dubbed “the pain cave,” host James Corden asked if he keeps food near the gym.

“What I like to do is send people, like, cakes, stuff like that,” said Cruise. He revealed that he sent cakes to Bassett and her husband Courtney B. Vance. The actress responded, “But only I ate it.”

“I love sugar, but I can’t eat it because when I’m training, you know, I’m doing all these movies,” explained Cruise. “So I send it to everyone. I send it to the stunt team.” He added that he likes hearing about the cakes. “And I wait for the calls. Like, tell me about it.”

Corden then revealed that Cruise sent him a cake the morning of the 2018 Grammy Awards, which he hosted. “I woke up to someone knocking on my door. It was like 8 a.m. and they presented me with an incredible chocolate cake and it was from Tom Cruise saying ‘Good luck at the Grammys,”’ he said. “I was like, ‘This is how you look so good. You make everyone around you fat.'”

“I got fitted for the suits the night before,” Corden said. “By the time I got to the show people were like, ‘What’s happened here? What’s all of that around your face?”‘ He said he answered the questions by stating, “This is something I never thought I’d say in my life. ‘It was a cake from Tom Cruise.'”

The host then shared that Cruise has said his sense of adventure comes from his mother. “She wasn’t necessarily a daredevil, but she had just a wonderful sense of adventure and she was someone that always the cup was half full,” he said. “We called her the Merry Mary Lee because no matter what was happening, there was always a smile there.”

Cruise also revealed that he went skydiving with his mother. “I used to do a lot of crazy things and what I did was, it was Mother’s Day, so I flew her in and I was shooting actually Days of Thunder,” he said. “They didn’t know I was skydiving at the time. When I’d wrap I’d go skydiving and I was training down in DeLand, Florida and so I’d have the airplane land right on the runway. I didn’t tell her what was happening. I just said, ‘Come with me, Mom.'” After he explained to his mother what they were about to do, she responded, ‘OK, honey. Let’s do it.'”

“We went skydiving together. I went in and kissed her in the thing as we were going down and I had a whole video tape, a VHS, and when it was done I had FedEx-ed it to all my sisters and arranged it so it arrived pretty much the same time. I said they can’t open it until a specific time of day and then they open it and put it on and saw what we were doing.” Cruise concluded that they were shocked.

Later in the interview, Cruise discussed his interest in performing risky stunts. “I want to entertain an audience, and we come up with great stories and different things we can do and able to put a camera in places that you normally can’t,” he said. “It’s not just stunts. It’s storytelling and character.”

Cruise added that he has been a daredevil from a young age. “I can’t help it. I’m 100 percent when I do something and I just want to give the audience my very best and that’s what I do,” he said.

Corden shared that he is not very impressed by the halo jump, which is when someone jumps from a high altitude and doesn’t open their parachute until they are very low. The risky move is featured in the film.

Bassett tried to explain just how far the jump is for the move and Corden responded, “But you say jump. It’s falling.” He continued, “It’s falling through the sky.”

“I think we’re all getting carried away with the Tom Cruise, action hero,” he said before giving his best impression of the fall. “That’s basically it, isn’t it?”

“It’s a little more than that,” Cruise responded. “It took 106 jumps to get it, but if you’re interested, I’m happy to take you if you wanna try it.” After the crowd broke into a round of applause, Corden and Cruise agreed to go skydiving together and shook on it.