Tom Cruise’s world tour of the Midlands

by Simon Brew |
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Tom Cruise is out and about – and how rare is it to see a Hollywood star at the local curry house? We follow his progress around our neck of the woods.

It is precious little secret that Tom Cruise appears to making a tour of the UK, as production on two Mission: Impossible movies continues. The plan is to shoot the two films back to back, and work started pre-pandemic. When lockdown happened, Cruise found himself primarily based in Britain, and as such he’s been spotted from time to time. Nothing special there.

What’s a bit different is where his travels continue to take him. Put bluntly, us in the West Midlands are now looking over our shoulders when we pop to the Co-op, or get in the queue at Maccy Ds. Because by the growing number of Twitter reports, The Cruiser might just pop up at any moment. Heck, he might be about to deliver my Amazon package here in Halesowen for all I know.

This trend started last year, when he popped to the cinema in London to go and watch Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster, Tenet. That said, it was all a pre-ordained, as the glossy promo clip demonstrates…

I like the bit where he said ‘how did the happen’, given that he was being filmed driving through a pretty empty London. Point was though that he was visibly supporting cinema at a time not many people were.

Since then, production on the Mission: Impossible films – directed by Christopher McQuarrie – has ramped up. And in particular, over the last week or two our Tom has found his way up the M40. He stopped off at the British Grand Prix at the end of July, and managed to swag a ticket for the Euro 2020 final at Wembley. But still: he’s been edging further north to sample what us lot up here get up to.

Over in the Peak District is the village of Stoney Middleton, set in the Derbyshire Dales. The average price of a hotel is in the £150-200 range, and it might have been challenging getting a room in mid-August. The Mission: Impossible team rocked up for a stunt. Going spoiler light, it involved a train, and a stunt that had been in the making for months. Cruise popped along to watch it happen, and if you want to see more, head over to the BBC.

Then it was to Warwickshire though on his tour of the Midlands. This time, he needed a place to land a helicopter, and the closure of the local Coventry Airport presented a major challenge this time. Thus, a local family with presumably a fair bit of land got a call asking if they’d mine a private helicopter landing. Alison Webb therefore said yes, and found Cruise stepping out his chopper on her back field. Not everyone can say that. Once necessaries were completed, he took her and her family for a quick whizz in it.

Next? A zip across the Midlands to its glorious beating heart, Birmingham. Asha’s in Birmingham does a mean curry, and Cruise tucked into two of them, posing for a photograph afterwards. He wouldn’t have been pulling this face if he’d gone for a vindaloo, based on my extensive first hand knowledge of Brummie curries…

Furthermore, less reported, the crew of the film followed him there a day or two later…

As any Brummie will tell you though, a trip to Birmingham is nothing without popping by the Bull Ring. Turns out Cruise was right next door, filming at the city’s infamous New Street station. That said, it’d been redressed as Abu Dhabi airport, and I for one am going to take the obvious gag and suggest that if it makes the trains run closer to time, I’m all for it. The second gag would involve weaving some combination of trains on time and the name of the film he was shooting, but I’m above that.

Cruise had actually been spotted around the Birmingham shops in late July, as he scouted locations with director Christopher McQuarrie. But the mystery now is which Midlands location will he turn up at next, before the shoot goes off to Scandinavia next month?

Will he catch a match at the Blues? Will he visit the Black Country Museum? A nice queue in the traffic at Spaghetti? And heck, if he turns up at Mr Egg for his breakfast, you may as well switch Twitter off for a week…

Image: BigStock

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