Top Gun: Maverick‘s Jay Ellis on getting notes from Tom Cruise and pulling G-forces in an F-18

In Top Gun: Maverick, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell returns to the iconic flight school to shepherd a new generation of pilots through the maneuvers he perfected almost 40 years ago. What the characters experience on screen, the actors mirrored in real life, as Tom Cruise put his younger costars through their paces—not only to learn how to endure the G-forces resulting from their collective need for speed, but to transition from promising young performers into the kind of leading men and women worthy of the mantle of superstardom that Cruise has achieved.

Since his breakthrough roles in The Game and Insecure, Jay Ellis has already set himself on that path, and more than anything else, Maverick evidences his capacity to hold his own against the other up-and-coming stars of his generation. Ellis recently spoke to The A.V. Club about the work he did to feel comfortable in the cockpit of an F-18 and why, with or without Cruise as a spiritual co-pilot, actually performing scenes in the planes was fully necessary. Ellis also touched on the larger imprint of Cruise’s legacy, and the Top Gun franchise as a whole.

Jay Ellis: You know, it’s funny because we questioned that in the beginning. We were all like, “Wait, why are we doing all of this? This is crazy!” And then you start to realize that it’s not. Like yes, we are acting up there, but also we are pilots up there. We’re really going through every single thing that our characters are going through. We as individuals, as actors are going through what our characters are going through in any given moment. And I wouldn’t walk onto Chris Paul’s court and be like, yo, I’m about to drop dimes all day long. I just wouldn’t, you know what I’m saying? I would be very self-conscious. And I think that is the same thing about being a pilot. You can’t just hop in a plane and feel like you got it on a green screen. That’s just not realistic. And we were fortunate enough to be at a time where we could actually go make a movie in the back of F-18s and do this for real.

It is a huge, huge difference to know what it feels like to put G’s on your body day in and day out and to fly through super tight valleys and over the desert and pulling all these maneuvers. It’s something that I don’t believe that you could actually just act. I do think you needed the training for it. You needed to know the proficiency at which you need to be able to do those things—and what’s at stake, that was also another thing. The stakes are so real for these characters and you can only understand that and learn that, I think, by being in flight and understanding all the things in flight that could potentially go sideways. And then on top of that, you’re in the middle of a mission or a dogfight or whatever it is. I mean, you had to experience it.

AVC: Were there any surprises by the time you guys actually got to the maneuvers? Or was it a matter of acting surprised even though you’d been through it 40 times in rehearsal?

JE: If you had a rehearsed moment in a jet going 700 to 1,000 miles an hour, you are a way better actor than I am, I’m telling tell you right now. And I say that because every flight is different. Like yes, we rehearsed a ton and yes, we built up the endurance to take G’s and we knew the maneuvers we would be doing. But we did those, first of all, in a completely different aircraft. You did not have four cameras staring at you. You did not have 40 or 50 people waiting when you got back on the ground after you landed to watch through your footage with you, and watch your flight and see what you were able to capture. The training was meant to get us to this moment, obviously. And then once you get in the air, you get a little bit lower to the ground, a little bit lower to the ground. All the things just start to feel different.

You get the ground rush by you in a completely different way when you’re at 5,000 feet off the surface versus a thousand feet. It’s a completely different experience. And so I think the preparation for me was more about understanding flight, understanding the toll that it takes on your body, understanding what it looks like when you’re in a jet and you have to move one way or another and how your head rolls with you when you do that. But then once you’re up there, man, my pilot, the guy who flew me is a guy by the callsign Washjob, when he throws that stick, I may say “one, two, three,” but he might throw it at the top of three. He might throw it at the bottom of three. He might throw it on four. So you were truly reacting to the things that are happening to you while you’re up there.

AVC: Looking at Tom’s movies over the last 20 years, it feels like there’s a real generosity in him wanting to give his co-stars opportunities to shine. What was the attitude he brought to make you feel confident while you were supporting Tom Cruise in a movie?

JE: It was this thing where you go to work every day and you look up and all of a sudden Tom Cruise is standing in front of you and you’re like, oh shit, that is Tom Cruise. Then you get to the day and Tom comes over and he whispers in your ear and he’s like, “Hey, next time when you do that, try doing this and just like, see what happens.” And then you’re like, “Oh, he gave me a note!” That was cool—but the coverage was on him, and he still gave me a note. It’s one of those things where you realize that he’s paying attention at all times to every single one of us. And he also told us very early on, I want to show you the things that I have done in my career and the resources that I’ve been able to kind of use to build this body of work. And you take with you what you want. If you don’t want any of it, cool. I just want to be able to show it to you. And if you want to take it all, cool. I’ll be there to walk you through all of it and talk you through all of it. And he stuck to that, man.

When we were doing our flight training, we used to have to do this kind of a questionnaire after every single flight where we would answer, “How was your flight? Is there anything you need to make your experience better? What would you like to learn next? How many G’s did you pull today?” And you’d write in all of these answers and we did it on a computer, and it would get sent to Tom to read. And the next thing you know, the next day you would get an email from Tom and he would say, “Hey, I read your questions last night. Going to add a few more days to your flight training. Does next week work for you?” So all of a sudden you’re realizing that he’s paying attention to what you’re doing off set as well on set while he’s also in the middle of making this movie and running this whole thing—and also being Maverick. And it’s just gracious, man. It’s so humbling. And he cares. He really, really cares, and wants each one of us to be great. And I think every single one of us sat a little bit taller because of that, because somebody who you idolize and you think is such an amazing actor and person believes in you in that same way. And it’s inspiring.

AVC: The original film is famous for being a great military recruitment tool. You host the podcast series The Untold Story, which is very much about institutionalized systems and exploring those elements. Did you have any trepidation about jumping into a project like this?

JE: No. The thing that I always go back to is, my family has given their lives to this. We’re generational in the armed forces in this country. My grandfathers, my father, cousins who have now done it, who are the next generation. And so for me, the thing that I always take away is like, I honor and respect and I’m so grateful for the men and women who go into armed forces every single day to protect us. And they sacrifice time away from their families. And sometimes they sacrifice their lives. And they do it so my daughter can go to school and their kid can go to school and your kid can go to school. And I think that’s such a humbling thing. And so when you go and you make a movie like this, obviously we know the same thing and we met so many people in the Navy who told us they joined because they saw Top Gun and that was a big influence for them. And people even outside of the Navy who were just in the general aviation community at large are like, “I fell in love with flight because of that movie.”

You realize that there is a responsibility, and you want to make sure that you represent these characters, a very diverse range of characters—our first female pilot all the way down to literally the different racial backgrounds that all these characters have in the movie. We all wrapped our arms around it and we protected it because we realized there is a responsibility there. And Tom realized there was a responsibility there. And I think the thing that we wanted to do was make sure that, like, we were always just paying homage and saying thank you to the folks who do that for us day in and day out. And that was from how we carried ourselves to our performances, to how we leaned in and learned about every single thing that they do day to day.