Casey Wasserman Reveals Tom Cruise’s Payday for Death-Defying Olympics Stunt: Nothing

It’s been a month since Tom Cruise stole the show during the Paris Olympics closing ceremony, and people are still talking about it. By people, at least one person (today) and it’s precisely the guy you still want to hear from right about now: Casey Wasserman.

The mogul, who serves as LA28 president and chairperson, dished some behind-the-scenes secrets Tuesday afternoon about landing Cruise for the show-stopping turn that served to set the stage for what’s to come when Los Angeles hosts the games in four years. About that performance: The Mission: Impossible jumped off the Stade du France, landed inside the stadium, walked through a crowd of fans and accepted the official Olympic flag from Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Simone Biles. He then cruised through Paris on his motorcycle, rode it straight onto a plane near the Eiffel Tower, and then reappeared in a pre-recorded segment by skydiving into the hills behind the Hollywood sign.

“It’s amazing how fast he got to L.A., isn’t it?” Wasserman joked during a CNBC x Boardroom: Game Plan panel at Fairmont Miramar Hotel and Bungalows in Santa Monica. The session, titled We Got Next: LA 2028, featured Wasserman seated alongside Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, LA28 board of directors member Jessica Alba, Team USA managing director Grant Hill and moderator Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC’s Squawk Box. Sorkin then asked Wasserman to give the audience the backstory of how it all came together.

“The backstory is that we realized we were producing a 15-minute live TV show, and so I hired who I think is the best person in the world to do that,” explained Wasserman, heaping praise on super producer and live TV guru Ben Winston. Wasserman continued by saying that Winston had two ideas after he was hired, one of which was Cruise while the other was making the Olympic rings appear out of the ocean “like a David Blane kind of thing.”

But once they got Cruise on Zoom to go over the idea, it quickly became clear that he was not only game for the segment, he wanted to do all his own stunts in the death-defying spectacle just like he does in the Mission: Impossible franchise.

“The best part of the story is we pitched on a Zoom and the original idea was a person in the stadium as a stunt double,” Wasserman explained. “We’re like, well, there’s no way we’re getting this. We’re going to get four hours of filming time. We’ll do the thing that the L.A. with the Hollywood sign, he’ll hand the thing off and he’s done. Maybe we’ll get the other stuff and the rest will be just a stunt double. About five minutes into the presentation [Tom Cruise] goes, ‘I’m in. But I’m only doing it if I get to do everything.’”

After the Zoom ended, Winston then called Wasserman. “He says, ‘Don’t get too excited. He loves doing this stuff but when his team realizes how many shooting days it’s going to be and rehearsals, this is never happening. I’m telling you I got it, but it’s never happening.’ Sure enough, every step of the way, he got more involved and more engaged.”

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Winston said the original plan called for a balaclava-clad stunt person to the heavy lifting, but Cruise again brushed that aside. “I don’t think there’s anybody like him in the world,” said Winston, who heads up Fulwell 73 Productions. “There is no better collaborator.”

Not only did he dive headfirst into the segment, Wasserman explained that Cruise — and everyone else on the project, for that matter — did it all for free. It’s a fact made even more impressive by what was required of Cruise to make it happen. “He finished filming Mission: Impossible at 6 p.m. in London, got right on a plane. He landed in L.A. at 4 a.m., and filmed the scene where he pulls onto a military plane. In L.A., he does two jumps out of the thing. He didn’t like the first one, so he did a second jump. Then he helicoptered from Palmdale to the Hollywood sign, filmed from 1 until 5, helicoptered to Burbank Airport and flew back to London.”

Another fun moment from today’s panel came when Wasserman said that they were able to pull off the Hollywood sign filming thanks to a “one of those weird lucky L.A. things.” He was referencing how the cameras that are always streaming the scene around the Hollywood sign just so happened to not be on when Cruise was in the vicinity. “I don’t know what happened, Andrew,” Wasserman quipped. “The cameras didn’t work that day and we were able to pull it off.”

For the record, Hollywood Sign Trust chairman Jeff Zarrinnam confirmed that they were in on the security camera outage. “Even our own cameras, our security cameras were turned off and not recording during this stunt,” Zarrinnam previously told NBC Los Angeles.

During the lively panel discussion, Wasserman also saved some praise for Paris and the people of France. “The French team deserves a lot of credit,” he noted. “They reminded people why people fall in love with the Olympics. … It’s been a long time since you had a really beautiful, high-engaged global city that had the resources and the time and the opportunity to take advantage of what the Olympics can be, and they did it spectacularly. To me, the greatest thing they did was they energized the people of France and those stadiums were full and excited, and you saw the results for the French teams being remarkable.”