Top Gun: Maverick director says he cast Brad Pitt over Tom Cruise in his new F1 movie because "Tom always pushes it to the limit" and "that terrifies me"

Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski says he went with Brad Pitt for his new F1 movie over Tom Cruise – mainly for safety reasons.

"Tom always pushes it to the limit, but at the same time is super capable and very skilled," Kosinski told Variety. "They both have the natural talent for driving. But yeah, I could see Tom maybe scaring us a little bit more."

Cruise is known for his death-defying stunts, going all out for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning by hanging from a biplane and holding his breath in a submarine quickly filling with water. In Top Gun: Maverick, the majority of the aerial stunts were done in real time and without CGI – with Cruise making the new, younger cast members undergo a bootcamp of sorts where they learned to fly for real.

F1 stars Pitt as Sonny Hayes, a Formula One driver who raced in the 1990s and had a horrible crash that forced him to retire from Formula One. Many years later, Ruben, A Formula One team owner and longtime friend, asks Sonny to come out of retirement to mentor rookie prodigy Joshua "Noah" Pearce (Damson Idris) for the Apex Grand Prix team (APXGP).

“We’d have had a crash," action-vehicle supervisor Graham Kelly agreed. “Tom pushes it to the limit. I mean really to the limit. That terrifies me. I mean, I’ve done loads of Mission: Impossibles with Tom and it’s the most stressful experience for someone like me building cars for him, doing stunts with him. Whereas Brad listens and he knows his abilities, and I think he’d be the first to say, 'Yeah, I’m not going to do that.'"

F1 is set to hit theaters on June 27. For more, check out our list of the most exciting upcoming movies in 2025 and beyond, or, check out our list of movie release dates.