Tom Cruise took doing his own stunts to new heights with his latest “Mission: Impossible” movie.
Over the weekend the actor proved he is still very much the adrenaline junkie as he dangled almost 2,717 feet from the tallest building in the world: Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.
On Saturday, the actor was seen hanging precariously from the observation deck of the building, which is 124 floors high, as fans watched in awe from the street below.
Dressed all in black, the 48-year-old ran across the windows of the tower as technicians and film crew watched from an open window above him.
Another actor hung alongside him for the scene, during which Cruise jumped over him, chasing round the exterior of the building.
A helicopter hovered just 10 feet from the building as crew inside filmed the scene for “Mission Impossible 4,” which will be released next year.
And even by his standards, this weekend’s stunt was Cruise’s most dangerous yet, as onlookers watched with their heart in their mouths, according to London’s Daily Mail.
Cruise was later joined by his co-stars Jeremy Renner, 39, and Paula Patton, 34, at the Armani hotel where they held a press conference to announce that the fourth installment in the movie franchise will be called “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.”
Courteney Cox is speaking out for the first time about her split with husband David Arquette.
“I don’t know what will happen, but this is not like we’re getting divorced,” Cox says in a new interview with Australia’s TV Week. “This is a separation and I think that takes a lot of courage . . . Whatever is supposed to happen will be the best thing for us.”
Still, Cox acknowledges that she and her husband of 11 years are no longer on the same page. “Sometimes you just realize ‘Wow, we actually have grown apart,” she says.
Referring to an interview that Arquette did with radio host Howard Stern, which aired right after their split was announced (and for which he later apologized), Cox said, “(David) is a kook. It’s not shocking and Howard Stern — he loves him and I’m a fan of Howard Stern . . . David is an entertainer and I’m sure the people who listen to the radio are entertained by his stories.”
He’s in jail. But Lil Wayne is still everywhere.
He has the No. 1-selling album in the country. He’s on the president’s iPod. He’s on the charts with two singles and a collaboration on a third. He’s on Facebook with updates for the more than 14 million people following them.
“The challenge was to make sure you feel like he never left,” says Bryan “Birdman” Williams, the Cash Money Records co-founder who has fostered Lil Wayne’s career since the rapper’s teens. “We came with a good strategy, and it worked.”
The rapper, who’s expected to be sprung Thursday after serving eight months in a gun case, is the first artist in 15 years to release a No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart while serving a sentence. Tupak Shakur previously held that distinction. His “I Am Not a Human Being” spent a week in the top slot and has sold more than 323,000 copies since its Sept. 27 release, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Members of the rapper’s management team carefully scheduled releases of music and saw to it that his responses to the deluge of fan mail that has descended on the city’s Rikers Island jail complex were typed up and posted online, according to the L.A. Times. They have become regulars at Rikers’ visiting hours and have played, and recorded, music over a jail phone.
The Lil Wayne campaign even comes with its own slogan — “free Weezy,” one of his nicknames — circulated through channels ranging from T-shirts to a Twitter hashtag.
“I never imagined that I could have such an impact on people’s lives,” he wrote in July on the site, Weezythanxyou.com.
He’s expected to get out early because of time off for good behavior, despite the electronic contraband that landed him in solitary confinement for the last month of his term: a charger and headphones for a digital music player were found in his cell, jail officials said. (He acknowledged the misstep on his blog.)
Prosecutors have charged rapper T.I.‘s wife with one count of misdemeanor drug possession stemming from an arrest last month on the Sunset Strip.
Prosecutors charged Tameka Cottle with possession of ecstasy on Friday and she appeared in court for an arraignment yesterday in Beverly Hills. The 35-year-old was arrested along with her husband on Sept. 1 during a traffic stop.
Prosecutors on Monday declined to charge T.I., citing a federal judge’s decision to send him to federal prison for 11 months for violating his probation on weapons charges and the small amount of drugs found on him. A charge evaluation sheet said deputies found four ecstasy pills on the Grammy Award winner.
It was not immediately clear whether Cottle had an attorney.
— The Associated Press also contributed to this report
lsmith@denverpost.com
