PEOPLE Top Gun

TOP GUN: FROM THE 1986 HIT FILM TO MAVERICK TOM CRUISE, JENNIFER CONNELLY, MILES TELLER & MORE • FLYING WITH THE NEW CREW PLUS THAT LOVIN’ FEELIN’: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE ORIGINAL BLOCKBUSTER…

A LOT OF PEOPLE WORKED for many years to deliver a sequel to Top Gun. To take nothing away from the filmmakers’ long-held vision, the idea that there should be a follow-up to 1986’s highest-earning film is a no-brainer. The potent combination of daredevil aerial action, romantic tension, personal sacrifice, hot bods playing ball on the beach and boozy bar singing never gets old. Neither, it seems, does star Tom Cruise who, in fact, turns 60 in 2022 and is (as his Instagram bio reminds us) still running in movies. But despite a desire for another chapter—on the part of fans, studio execs and Cruise himself—decades passed without one. And then, in 2019, he turned up to reveal a trailer at Comic-Con in San Diego, down the street from where…

TOM CRUISE has, after 40 years of making movies, earned the right to rest on his laurels—or at least on his couch. His films have grossed more than $10 billion. He’s a triple-Oscar-nominated leading man who does his own stunts: hangs from planes, rides choppers off cliffs, leaps across rooftops (breaking his ankle in one instance but not his stride). His decision to reprise the character who proved, 36 summers ago, that Cruise could open a blockbuster now puts the weight of Top Gun: Maverick’s success on the star’s shoulders. Yet on the eve of his 60th birthday, he shows no signs of taking a pause—or even a nap. The only topic that seems to make him weary (or tip off his age) is promotion. “It used to be, I…

JENNIFER CONNELLY ★ AS ★ PENNY AFTER EARNING ACCLAIM FOR DARKER ROLES, THE ACTRESS WAS READY TO TAKE ON TOP GUN’S SUNNY SO-CAL LOVE INTEREST (LUCKILY, SHE’D RECENTLY CONQUERED HER FEAR OF FLYING) BY ERIK FORREST JACKSON ONCE A CHILD STAR, Jennifer Connelly graduated to make a name for herself in dark and dramatic fare. She earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination playing a heroin addict in Requiem for a Dream (2000) and, a year later, an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, in which she portrayed the real-life physicist wife of schizophrenic mathematician John Nash. With some detours into the Marvelverse (2003’s Hulk) and ensemble rom-com (He’s Just Not That Into You, 2009), Connelly continued building a résumé of deeply researched somber roles. So it might surprise some to hear…

THE CALL CAME IN the middle of the night. Jerry Bruckheimer picked up the phone; it was Tom Cruise, and he sounded concerned. The producer and the actor were working on a sequel to their 1986 hit Top Gun, and Cruise was fretting over a particular effect in the new film, which had completed photography and now was being edited for sound. In the more than three decades between Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick, both military flight and moviemaking technology had evolved significantly. So what was on the star’s mind at this late hour? Bruckheimer recalls: “Tom says, ‘You know that door closing in Cain’s office? It’s too loud. We should fix it.’” It’s been 36 years since Pete “Maverick” Mitchell first felt the need for speed. Top Gun…

To create a score for Maverick, the Academy Award-winning composer Hans Zimmer could have stayed safely at the keyboard and behind the conductor’s podium. Instead he did a kind of musician’s version of Method acting: He jumped out of a plane. “I was strapped to an instructor and shoved out of an airplane for free fall, which is a different way of embracing what you’re composing,” says Zimmer. Over the past 38 years, Zimmer has scored some 150 movies, capturing his Oscar for 1994’s The Lion King. His powerfully evocative soundscapes, with rich orchestrations and frequent use of electronics, have also enhanced Gladiator, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, the Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Dunkirk and Blade Runner 2049. But Maverick was no ordinary commission. It would not be a…