Never thought I’d make Top Gun sequel: Tom Cruise

“Everywhere I went, people would be like, ‘Do Top Gun’, and I’m like, ‘Guys, I don’t know how to do it’.

“I don’t know what the story is. I don’t make movies just to make movies. I was like, ‘Jerry, it’s never going to happen’. I honestly never thought I would make it,” Cruise told Empire magazine.

And over three decades later, the 57-year-old star is set to reprise his role as Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick.

The film will be set in a world of drone technology and will explore the end of the era of dogfighting, with Tom Cruise portraying a flight instructor.

When they eventually zeroed in on what they wanted to do in the sequel, the actor said he was sure he wanted to do the stunts on his own, not go for the computer generated imagery (CGI).

“We just started talking. And I realised that there were things that we could accomplish cinematically.

“And I started getting excited about this big challenge of, ‘How do we do it?’ So I said to Jerry, ‘I’ll do it if’ meaning, I’m not going to do the CGI stuff,” Tom Cruise said.

Maverick is directed by Oblivion fame Joseph Kosinski.