Into the danger zone again? A Top Gun: Maverick sequel hasn’t yet been announced, but fans are clamoring for one — and so are some of the blockbuster film’s cast and crew members.
“My whole cast, we would all be there in a heartbeat,” Jay Ellis, who played Reuben “Payback” Fitch in the hit movie, told Fox News Digital in November 2022. “We would be grateful to be there.”
Released in May 2022, the action drama followed Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) as he recruited and trained a new generation of fighter pilots for a specialized mission. Development on the film began in 2010, but it took another seven years to nail down the script and director. The lengthy process paid off, however, with the movie becoming the second-highest-grossing film of 2022 and the highest-grossing film of Cruise’s entire career.
In addition to Ellis, Maverick featured Glen Powell, Miles Teller, Lewis Pullman, Monica Barbaro, Danny Ramirez, Manny Jacinto and Greg Tarzan Davis as some of the recruits vying for a spot on Mitchell’s team. Pullman, for his part, said that watching Cruise in action was one of the best parts about working on the movie.
“I had to just transform into a sponge and just absorb, absorb, absorb because it was a new lesson every day,” the Press Play star exclusively told Us Weekly in June 2022. “I’ve never seen anyone approach filmmaking the way he does, and I’ve also never seen someone that far into their career who still has such drive, has such curiosity, has such passion has such a reluctance to settle, is always trying to make even the smallest scenes better.”
Jason Walsh, who trained Teller for his role as Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, said that the Mission: Impossible star made sure the cast was physically prepared for the film, down to having them go through flight training.
“Tom is a huge advocate of making sure that these guys are really put through the rigors and the tests,” the fitness instructor told Us in June 2022. “You can see it on their face. When they’re doing this, they’re not faking it. This is real.”
Davis, who played Javy “Coyote” Machado, said that the flight training was hard — but so was prepping for the instantly iconic beach football match. “We also had to get sexy for the beach scene,” he told Us in January 2023. “So, it was a lot of starvation, a lot of anger, a lot of testosterone, just running wild like, ‘I need food.’ Once we got done filming the beach scene, we just devoured food.”
Keep scrolling to see what the cast and crew of Top Gun: Maverick have said about a potential sequel: