Tom Cruise Visits Star Wars: Starfighter Set, Helps Shoot Lightsaber Duel
When Tom Cruise visited the Star Wars: Starfighter set, director Shawn Levy asked the Mission: Impossible star to hop behind the camera and help shoot a lightsaber fight. Ryan Gosling leads, alongside newcomer Flynn Gray, the Lucasfilm movie, set five years after Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker. The film, hitting theaters May 28, 2027, also stars Matt Smith, Amy Adams, Mia Goth and Aaron Pierre.
Tom Cruise’s name might be in the end credits of Star Wars: Starfighter.
The Mission: Impossible star visited the set of director Shawn Levy’s film—more than a year before its debut on May 28, 2027—where Hollywood’s hardest-working actor found himself filming a scene on the fly.
“Last week Steven Spielberg was here. And now Tom Cruise is wielding a camera, ruining his very nice shoes,” Levy told The New York Times, in an interview from Nov. 2025. “Now when you see the movie, you’ll know that part of it was shot by Tom. I mean, how cool is that?”
But what’s really cool? The actor applied his trademark eye for cinematic action sequences toward filming a lightsaber duel, with the journalist noting how Cruise waded into a muddy pond and held the camera “like a pro.”
The casual reference of a lightsaber in the movie, let alone described as being part of a fight scene, was a surprise considering how Lucasfilm has described Starfighter so far.
The Deadpool & Wolverine director and Ryan Gosling announced their journey to a galaxy far, far away at Star Wars Celebration Japan in April 2025.
“Starfighter is not a sequel. It's not a prequel,” Levy said while sitting alongside the movie’s star Ryan Gosling in a Lucasfilm interview last year. “It's a new standalone adventure, with new characters taking place in a new time period—about a half dozen years after Episode IX and the Battle of Exegol.”
While the plot is still hush-hush, Starfighter’s designation outside of the Skywalker Saga certainly primed fans not to expect an appearance by the Jedi Knights’ trademark weapon this time around.
The lightsaber duel confirmation will surely help Starfighter maintain excitement momentum more than a year out from hitting theaters, a task previously left to the movie’s out-this-world ensemble.
Matt Smith and Mia Goth have been announced to play villains, alongside costars Amy Adams and Aaron Pierre, with the cast also welcoming newcomer Flynn Gray.
Starfighter was written by Jonathan Topper, and Thomas Newman will oversee the music score.
“It's not just that these movies gave me movie memories. They gave me life memories,” Levy said in the interview last year. “They literally taught me a cinematic language. A storytelling language that I reference constantly. It's sort of a little bit surreal to now get to do it ourselves. It's terrifying, but thrilling.”
Star Wars: Starfighter will lightspeed into theaters May 28, 2027.
