Casey Wasserman reveals Tom Cruise's payday for Olympic stunt

It's been a month since Tom Cruise stole the show at the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics, and people are still talking about it. At least one person is (today), and that's the very guy you still want to hear from right now: Casey Wasserman.

The mogul, who serves as president and chairman of LA28, spilled some behind-the-scenes secrets Tuesday afternoon about how he secured Cruise for the spectacular performance that set the stage for what we can expect when Los Angeles hosts the Games in four years. About this performance: The Mission: Impossible The star jumped from the Stade du France, landed in the stadium, ran through a crowd of fans and accepted the official Olympic flag from Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Simone Biles. He then rode his motorcycle through Paris, hopped straight onto a plane near the Eiffel Tower, and then resurfaced in a pre-recorded segment by parachuting into the hills behind the Hollywood sign.

“It's amazing how quickly he got to LA, isn't it?” Wasserman joked during a CNBC x Boardroom: Game Plan panel at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel and Bungalows in Santa Monica. At the session, titled We Got Next: LA 2028, Wasserman sat alongside Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, LA28 board member Jessica Alba, Team USA executive Grant Hill and moderator Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC's Squawk BoxSorkin then asked Wasserman to tell the audience the backstory of how it all came together.

“The backstory is that we realized we were going to produce a 15-minute live TV show, so I hired the person I thought was the best in the world to do it,” Wasserman explained, heaping praise on super-producer and live TV guru Ben Winston. Wasserman continued by saying that after he was hired, Winston had two ideas, one of which was Cruise, while the other was to make the Olympic rings appear from the sea, “like a David Blaine kind of thing.”

But when they got Cruise to walk through the idea on Zoom, it quickly became clear that he was not only up for the segment, but also wanted to do all of his own stunts in the death-defying spectacle, just like in the Mission: Impossible Franchise.

“The best part of the story is that we pitched over Zoom and the original idea was to have a person in the stadium as a stunt double,” Wasserman explained. “We thought, 'There's no way we can do this. We get four hours of shooting. We do the LA thing with the Hollywood sign, he passes the thing and that's it. Maybe we get the other stuff and the rest is just a stunt double.' About five minutes into the presentation [Tom Cruise] says: 'I'm in. But I'll only do it if I can do everything.'”

After the Zoom meeting ended, Winston Wasserman called. “He said, 'Don't get too excited. He loves this stuff, but when his team realizes how many days of shooting and rehearsals it's going to take, it's never going to happen. I'm telling you, I get it, but it's never going to happen.' And in fact, he got more and more involved with each step.”

In an interview with The Hollywood ReporterWinston said the original plan called for a balaclava-clad stuntman to do the heavy lifting, but Cruise again dismissed that. “I don't think there's anyone like him in the world,” said Winston, who runs Fulwell 73 Productions. “There's no better person to work with.”

Not only did he throw himself headfirst into the segment, but he also explained that Cruise – and everyone else involved in the project – did everything for free. This fact becomes even more impressive when you consider what was required of Cruise to make the whole thing happen. “He finished filming Mission: Impossible in London at 6pm, got on a plane straight away. He landed in LA at 4am and filmed the scene where he gets on a military plane. In LA he did two jumps out of the thing. He didn't like the first one, so he did a second jump. Then he took a helicopter from Palmdale to the Hollywood sign, filmed from 1 to 5, took a helicopter to Burbank airport and flew back to London.”

Another funny moment from today's panel was when Wasserman said they were able to do the filming around the Hollywood sign in secret thanks to “one of those weird, lucky things in LA.” He was referring to the fact that the cameras that always broadcast the scene around the Hollywood sign happened not to be on when Cruise was around. “I don't know what happened, Andrew,” Wasserman joked. “The cameras weren't working that day and we were still able to do it.”

Hollywood Sign Trust Chairman Jeff Zarrinnam confirmed they were involved in the security camera outage. “Even our own cameras, our security cameras, were off and not recording during this stunt,” Zarrinnam previously told NBC Los Angeles.

During the lively panel discussion, Wasserman also praised Paris and the people of France. “The French team deserves a lot of credit,” he noted. “They reminded people why people fall in love with the Olympics. … It's been a long time since there was a really beautiful, highly engaged world city that had the resources, the time and the opportunity to realize the potential of the Olympics, and they did it in spectacular fashion. To me, the best thing they did was they energized the people of France, the stadiums were packed and excited, and you could see that the results of the French teams were remarkable.”