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Simon Pegg Recalls Tom Cruise’s ‘S--- Eating Grin’ for Mission: Impossible Stunt — and Another That Made Him 'Nervous'

Simon Pegg speaks about the wild stunts he's seen Tom Cruise pull off in the 'Mission: Impossible' franchise in a new special PEOPLE issue.

Starting with 1996’s original adaptation of the 1960s spy series, Cruise, 62, has upped the ante in each successive appearance as Ethan Hunt, high-flying, butt-kicking, fast-running agent for the Impossible Mission Force. Recalling a specific one — filming the sequence in 2011's Ghost Protocol, in which Cruise scales the outside of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building — Pegg remembers “just leaning out of the window and seeing Tom sort of hanging there, smiling, this big s--- eating grin on his face, like, ‘I'm having the best time.’ " Cruise, who exposed himself to potentially dangerous flying debris during that particular stunt, tells PEOPLE that when the plane taxied down the runway, his thought was, “Oh, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

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