Tom Cruise Barfed on Himself in the Jet Ride That Made Top Gun

Forty years ago, Tom Cruise got into a fighter jet, threw up on himself, climbed out, and made one of the most important phone calls in Hollywood history. That’s the origin story of Top Gun, and it’s even better than the movie.

As the 1986 classic hits its 40th anniversary — it soared into theaters on May 16, 1986, and became the highest-grossing domestic film of that year — producer Jerry Bruckheimer and screenwriter Jack Epps Jr. are looking back at how the whole thing came together. And the key moment, it turns out, involved a ponytail, a group of unimpressed Navy pilots, and a very eventful afternoon in the California desert.

Epps set the scene: Cruise, who was 23 at the time and hadn’t yet committed to the project, was taken up in a fighter jet by a group of U.S. Navy pilots who had absolutely no idea who he was. “They look at him and they don’t know who Tom Cruise is,” Epps told The Guardian. “They do what they like to do: they took him up, they shook him around, he barfed on himself, and he came out and said, ‘I love this.’ From that moment, he was on.”

Bruckheimer filled in the details. Cruise had been circling the film but wouldn’t fully commit, so Bruckheimer arranged for him to fly with the Blue Angels at their base in El Centro, California. There was one small complication: Cruise was fresh off the 1985 fantasy film Legend, and he showed up sporting long hair and a ponytail. The reception was exactly what you’d expect. “He had long hair and a ponytail and they saw this guy walk up and they said, ‘We’ll get this hippy a real ride,’” Bruckheimer recalled. “They sure did.”

After the flight, Cruise walked straight to a phone booth — “because there were no cell phones then,” Bruckheimer noted — and called the producer. The message was simple: “I’m in.”

Cruise Knew All Along — He Just Wanted the Ride

Here’s the twist. In a 2016 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Cruise revealed that he’d actually made up his mind to do the film after his very first meeting with Bruckheimer and the late director Tony Scott. The Blue Angels flight was, essentially, a negotiating tactic. “I told my agent, ‘I’m going to make this movie, but don’t tell Jerry I want to make this movie, because I want to fly with the Blue Angels,’” he said. “You’ve got work these things, you know? I’m a businessman.”

He also confirmed what Epps and Bruckheimer described. “I vomited with the Blue Angels,” he told Kimmel, apparently without a shred of embarrassment.

Blue Angels pilot Curt “Griz” Watson gave his own account of that flight in a 2023 video interview, describing how he took Cruise up in the back of the 7 jet and put him through some rolls and loops, even letting him take the controls briefly. Watson said he later received a handwritten letter from Cruise thanking him for the experience and noting that it “really helped me with my character development for the movie.”

The Wild Behind-the-Scenes Facts You Might Not Know

The Blue Angels story is just one piece of a production that was stranger and more remarkable than most people realize. According to Us Weekly‘s new 25-things retrospective, the producers paid the U.S. military a reported $1.8 million for access to Miramar Naval Air Station near San Diego — and it paid off. Navy recruitment reportedly surged after the film’s release.

Future NASA astronaut Scott Altman was among the real pilots recruited for stunt sequences, and he earned a reported $23 a day for his work. He can also be spotted in the film’s iconic opening sequence, in a moment that became its own piece of movie trivia.

Val Kilmer, who played fan-favorite Iceman, later claimed he was the only actor on set who didn’t get sick during the aerial rides — though he admitted in his 2020 memoir that his agent had “basically tortured” him into even meeting with director Tony Scott about the role. By the time Top Gun was a cultural phenomenon, Kilmer had a different perspective. “None of us knew at the time what a crazy commercial success the film would be,” he reflected in his 2021 documentary. “All of a sudden I was being catapulted into the celebrity stratosphere, and for the rest of my life I would be called Iceman by every pilot at every airport I went to.”

The beach volleyball scene — now one of the most parodied sequences in cinema history — was reportedly just a single paragraph in the script. It took a full day to shoot, which reportedly led the studio to threaten to fire Scott. Kelly McGillis’s character Charlie was based on real-life Pentagon figure Christine Fox, who eventually became the Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense. And yes, Cruise reportedly wore lifts in his scenes with McGillis, who stands three inches taller than him.

The film was so culturally significant that in 2015, the United States Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

What’s Next: Top Gun 3 Is Happening

The anniversary comes with some timely news. Top Gun 3 is officially in development at Paramount, with Cruise returning as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. Josh Greenstein, co-head of Paramount Pictures, announced the project at CinemaCon in April, describing it as “officially in development with a script underway.” Cruise appeared in a video message from atop the Paramount water tower in Los Angeles, offering a suitably cinematic tease: “The future looks pretty great from here.”

Christopher McQuarrie, who co-wrote and produced Top Gun: Maverick, has already suggested the third film’s story is essentially locked. “It’s already in the bag,” he said on the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast. “Ehren Kruger pitched something, and I went ‘Hmm, actually…’ And we had one conversation about it. The framework is there, so no, it’s not hard to crack.”

The sequel to the sequel has a lot to live up to. Top Gun: Maverick earned over $1.5 billion worldwide and became the highest-grossing film of Cruise’s entire career — built on a foundation of real aerial footage, a cast that trained for five months in actual aircraft, and actors enduring up to eight Gs of force during filming.

Cruise was spotted arriving at the London Heliport by helicopter on May 14, his first public appearance since the Top Gun 3 announcement — wearing a black jacket, black slacks, and aviator sunglasses, because of course he was.

Forty years on, the man who barfed in a fighter jet and called it the best day of his life is still chasing the horizon. Maverick, indeed.