GROWING UP, Greg Davis was a wild child. “My family used to say I was bad,” says Davis, “but I say I had a lot of energy!” With all that energy and long, curly hair down to his back that he later styled into dreads, he got the nickname “Tarzan” from his family. It’s since become his middle name in his credits as an actor in action films like Top Gun: Maverick and this summer’s Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One.
Shooting back-to-back projects with Tom Cruise requires every ounce of that Tarzan energy, something Davis knew from the grueling prep for Maverick, during which he withstood up to eight g’s of force and underwent intensive swim training. This time, a mere two weeks after he got the call for Mission: Impossible, Davis was on set—the “set” being a mountaintop in Norway—waiting to watch Cruise shoot a stunt involving a cliffside motorcycle BASE jump. “Tom flies over us hanging off the end of a helicopter, gets to the edge of the cliff, and just jumps off,” he says. “And that was his warmup for the actual stunt!”
Davis—who spent his youth dabbling in football, basketball, baseball, track, and tae kwon do—found kindred spirits and mentors in Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie. They all share a similar can’t-stop-won’t-stop attitude. But Davis knows how to relax, too, like on a trip to Jamaica last summer. “I’m a pool guy,” he says. “And I do enjoy swimming, now that I’ve learned from Top Gun.”
At a tucked away booth at the Heimat Fitness Concept Club in Los Angeles, where Davis had just wrapped a Men’s Health photoshoot sporting the summer’s most versatile shorts and shirts—get the look below!—he described his wild first day on set with Cruise for Mission: Impossible, how the movies pull their intense stunts together, and why he hopes we never see the unreleased footage of the now-iconic Maverick football beach scene.
Men’s Health: Your father is a boxer and so is one of your brothers, but you’ve taken up a lot of sports and types of exercise over the years. What’s been your exercise of choice to get into Mission: Impossible shape?
Greg Tarzan Davis: Boxing is currently is my exercise of choice. For Mission: Impossible, I did a lot of physical training that required me to learn different techniques, so I’ve taken up kickboxing on top of boxing. I mean, it’s Mission: Impossible—it’s an action film to the biggest degree. We do all our own stunts because that’s what you do with Tom Cruise, and there are sequences where my character shows a background in martial arts. Something I think is so cool about this film is that each character has their own specific fighting style or way of moving. Rebecca [Ferguson] has more more of fluid style of fighting, whereas I have more of a brute force style, and Tom has his own style, which we all saw in the amazing Mission: Impossible—Fallout bathroom fight scene. So if you go back and watch all the Mission: Impossible movies, you’ll see that each character has developed their own physicality.
Tom Cruise is known for going hard in his movies, whether it’s for stunts or fight scenes or chase sequences. Did you feel a lot of pressure to keep up?
There’s no pressure necessarily. But you’re always thinking, What is he going to have me do next? But he’s so good at preparing you for what you’re about to take on. So I’ve never been scared because I’ve been so prepared. He sets up all these training regimens in order for you to be able to do what you need to do. My training consistent of martial arts, weapons training, skydiving, drifting, motorcycle riding, and flying planes. It was like a crash course of every wild thing you can do in an action movie.
This is your first Mission: Impossible movie. What was your first impression when you got on set?
Okay, so, the stunts that we have in this movie are insane. The motorcycle stunt is insane. And to see it in person is really insane. I went to set every day, even when I wasn’t working, because I was shadowing McQ. I want to learn from him and Tom. They’ve been great mentors, teaching me all the intricate details of how things work, whether it’s on set or in the editing room.
On top of that, we’re all always on set when there’s a big stunt. So I remember on the very first day, we were in Norway, filming on top of a mountain cliff. I asked how we were going to get to set, and they said, “Oh, a helicopter.” So they send everybody to the top of the mountain by helicopter. It’s me, Haley Atwell, Simon Pegg, Pom Klementieff, Shea Whigham. We get up to the top of this mountain, and everyone is setting up for Tom to do a BASE jump off the cliff. So I asked, “Where’s Tom?” Then Tom flies over us hanging off the end of a helicopter, gets to the edge of the cliff, and just jumps off. And that was his warmup for the actual stunt!
Were there any sequences that you had to hype yourself up for?
My first day of shooting was actually to shoot my big stunt. I was like, “Damn, so this is how you ease people into the world of Mission: Impossible?” When you’re shooting stunts at these great heights, there’s something that kicks in, that happens in your mind: you just don’t want to fall. So you have to fight the urge to hang on for dear life. You have to look cool! You have to look like this is something you do all the time. In one particular shot, I lost my shoe and it just fell out of sight. I thought, That could have been me! Goddamn! Then I had to shoot the rest of the scene without a shoe. There was nothing we could do. The cameraman just had to try to hide my bare foot. It was a weird shot. But I couldn’t stop the whole production to go get my shoe. You keep going, you get something, and you see what they can do with it. It was the same kind of thing with Maverick. You’re up there in a cockpit by yourself, and you have to get the shot. You want to use every second available to you.
Tom and director McQ have made a lot of these movies over the years and developed their own approach to creating big action movie tentpoles. What was the process of creating a Mission: Impossible movie?
So I got my first actual, full script for Mission: Impossible two weeks before I wrapped the film. Izzy, the AD, came to my trailer and she said, “Hey, I have a gift for you!” And she handed me this big old printed script. But during most of the filming, you get pages throughout the process. When you’re shooting scenes with dialogue and you get the script for those scenes the night before, you have to adjust quickly and you have to trust McQ and Tom. But they also have to trust us. I think it’s incredible that they have so much faith in their actors to handle an unorthodox process, to be able to adapt, and to make the most of the freedom you get to help create your character and contribute. And I will say that Simon and Rebecca were also great at helping usher us in to the Mission way. We would go into a scene, we would do something, and McQ would say, “That’s really good. Do more of that.” Then the next day, he would come to you and say, “That thing you did yesterday, we were watching dailies, and we loved it and now we’re doing this new thing with your character.” And I’d seen this in Maverick too. My part was basically a background character, but I did one thing in one scene and they said, “Okay, let’s give him more.” So I was able to understand the process going into Mission.
Speaking of Maverick, it would be journalistic malpractice not to ask you about the beach football scene. What was it like to shoot that and try to live up to the beach volleyball scene in the original Top Gun?
That was an intense time. We killed ourselves for that beach scene because we knew how important it was, and how many people love the iconic volleyball scene from the first Top Gun. So we starved and worked out three times a day. We were angry campers—hangry campers.
Then we found out two weeks after we shot the scene—after everybody had just pigged out—that we had to shoot the scene again. So then we had to go through an expedited version of preparations. It was terrible!
Well, the results speak for themselves: the scene was so popular that last Christmas, Paramount+ looped the scene into a three hour yule log-style video for the holidays. Is there any more footage that you’re holding out on us?
Oh, there’s a lot of the footage that we did not want to put out from the beach scene in Maverick—out in fear of embarrassment!
Why was it so embarrassing?
There’s just one shot of all of us, oiled up, shirtless, doing the most erotic dances on the tarmac before even going to the beach. We’re not even on the beach yet! It started out with us all just working out, and someone started playing some music, so we all started getting into it. And suddenly there’s this raunchy Magic Mike moment happening on the tarmac of a naval base. Someone still has the footage! But we were supposed to be these hotshot pilots, so I’m pretty sure the studio just couldn’t put out a lot of the content that they recorded. And I am thankful for that!
This interview has been condensed for content and clarity.
Nojan Aminosharei is the Entertainment Director of Men’s Health and the Special Projects Editor of Harper’s Bazaar. He was previously the Entertainment Director of Hearst Digital Media, and before that a Senior Editor at GQ. Raised in Vancouver, Canada, Nojan graduated from NYU with a master’s degree in magazine journalism. The late Elaine Stritch once told him, “What the fuck kind of name is Nojan? I’m 89 years old, I don’t have time for that shit.”
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