Casey Wasserman Reveals Tom Cruise's Pay for Olympics Stunt

It's been a month since Tom Cruise stole the show at the Paris Olympics closing ceremony, and people are still talking about it. At least one person (today) is talking about it, and it's the kind of person you still want to hear from right now: Casey Wasserman.

The mogul, who is chairman and president of LA28, revealed some behind-the-scenes secrets Tuesday afternoon about hiring Cruise for the spectacular turnaround that set the stage for what’s to come when Los Angeles hosts the games in four years. On that performance: Mission: Impossible He jumped off the Stade du France, landed inside the stadium, rode through a crowd of fans, and received the official Olympic flag from Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Simone Biles. He then rode a motorcycle through Paris, rode it directly into a plane near the Eiffel Tower, and then reappeared in a pre-recorded segment parachuting into the hills behind the Hollywood sign.

“It’s amazing how quickly it got to LA, isn’t it?” Wasserman joked during a CNBC x Boardroom: Game Plan panel at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel and Bungalows in Santa Monica. The session, titled We Got Next: LA 2028, featured Wasserman sitting alongside Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, LA28 board member Jessica Alba, Team USA general manager Grant Hill, and moderator Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC Box of squeaksSorkin then asked Wasserman to tell the audience the story of how it all began.

“The basic story is that we realized we were producing a 15-minute live TV show, and so I hired what I think is the best person in the world to do it,” Wasserman explained, praising super producer and live TV guru Ben Winston. Wasserman went on to say that Winston had two ideas upon being hired, one of which was Cruise and the other was to make the Olympic rings appear out of the ocean “like a David Blane thing.”

But once they reached out to Cruise on Zoom to discuss the idea, it quickly became clear that not only was he up for the segment, but he also wanted to do all of his own stunts in the death-defying show, just like he does in Mission: Impossible franchising.

“The best part of the story is that we pitched on Zoom and the original idea was a person in the stadium as a stunt double,” Wasserman explained. “We were like, well, there's no way we're going to get that. We're going to have four hours of shooting. We're going to do the LA thing with the Hollywood sign, he'll pass the thing and be done. Maybe we'll get the other stuff and the rest will just be a stunt double. About five minutes into the presentation [Tom Cruise] he says, “I'm in. But I'll only do it if I can do it all.”

After the Zoom ended, Winston called Wasserman. “He says, ‘Don’t get too excited. He loves doing this stuff, but when his team realizes how many days of shooting it’s going to take and how many rehearsals, that’s never going to happen. I tell you, I get it, but it’s never going to happen.’ He definitely got more involved and more committed every step of the way.”

In an interview with The Hollywood ReporterWinston said the original plan was for a stuntman in a balaclava to lift weights, but Cruise again ignored that. “I don’t think there’s anyone like him in the world,” said Winston, who runs Fulwell 73 Productions. “There’s no better collaborator.”

Not only did he dive headfirst into the segment, Wasserman explained that Cruise (and everyone else on the project, for that matter) did it for free. It's a fact made all the more impressive by what was required of Cruise to make it. “He finished filming Mission: Impossible at 6 p.m. in London, he immediately got on a plane. He landed in Los Angeles at 4 a.m. and filmed the scene where he gets on a military plane. In Los Angeles, he does two jumps out of the thing. He didn't like the first one, so he did a second one. Then he flew in a helicopter from Palmdale to the Hollywood sign, filmed from 1 to 5, flew in a helicopter to Burbank airport and got on a flight back to London.”

Another funny moment from today's panel was when Wasserman said they were able to shoot the Hollywood sign because of “one of those weird lucky L.A. things.” He was referring to the fact that the cameras that always broadcast the scene around the Hollywood sign weren't running when Cruise was nearby. “I don't know what happened, Andrew,” Wasserman joked. “The cameras weren't rolling that day, and we were able to get through it.”

For the record, Hollywood Sign Trust President Jeff Zarrinnam confirmed that they were involved in the security camera disruption. “Even our cameras, our security cameras were off and not recording during this stunt,” Zarrinnam previously told NBC Los Angeles.

During the lively panel discussion, Wasserman also reserved some praise for Paris and the French people. “The French team deserves a lot of credit,” he noted. “They reminded people why people fall in love with the Olympics. … It’s been a long time since there was a really beautiful, really engaged global city that had the resources and the time and the opportunity to harness what the Olympics can be, and they did it spectacularly. For me, the greatest thing they did was energize the French people, and those stadiums were packed and excited, and you saw the results for the French teams be remarkable.”