Top Gun: Maverick: 12 Interesting Facts You Didn’t Know

Top Gun: Maverick is a 2022 American action drama film directed by Joseph Kosinski and written by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Christopher McQuarrie (who also wrote The Usual Suspects) from a story by Peter Craig and Justin Marks.

Here are 12 Interesting Facts about Top Gun: Maverick

1. It’s a sequel to the 80s classic Top Gun, which won an Oscar for Giorgio Moroder’s Take My Breath Away, a Grammy for Harold Faltermeyer and Steve Steven’s Top Gun Anthem, and the 1987 People’s Choice Award for Favourite Motion Picture, among other accolades.

Top Gun, which is also available to stream on Showmax, was directed by the late Tony Scott and starred a 21-year-old Tom Cruise alongside the likes of Oscar winner Tim Robbins (The Shawshank Redemption), Emmy winners Anthony Edwards (ER) and Tom Skerritt (Alien), multi-award-winner Meg Ryan (When Harry Met Sally) and the late Kelly McGillis (Witness).

2. Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer reprise their roles from the original film, as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell and Tom “Iceman” Kazansky. Rivals in the original film, they are now firmly friends in Top Gun: Maverick, although their careers have taken very different paths.

After more than 30 years of service as one of the navy’s top aviators, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Oscar nominee Tom Cruise) is where he belongs, pushing the envelope as a courageous test pilot and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him. Iceman, in contrast, is now an Admiral, who assigns Maverick the job of training a detachment of Top Gun graduates for a specialised mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen.

3. Tom Cruise actually flies in both films. On Friday September 7, 2018, Tom Cruise returned to Miramar, the military base where much of Top Gun was filmed 33 years previously, and underwent a full ASTC (Aviation Survival Training Curriculum), to qualify for the extensive flying sequences in U.S. Navy F/A-18s that he had personally insisted were essential to the making of Top Gun: Maverick. He also put the key cast through five months of intense flight training.

4. The director of Top Gun: Maverick, Joseph Kosinski, still vividly remembers the first time he saw the original Top Gun, at the Orpheum Theater in Marshalltown, Iowa. He’d just turned 12 years old, and thought Maverick was one of the greatest characters he’d ever seen on the big screen. He was so inspired by all the state-of-the-art machinery on display that he would later study aerospace and mechanical engineering at Stanford before switching gears and moving into the world of filmmaking.

5. Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly plays Penny Benjamin, Maverick’s love interest in the new film. While Connelly didn’t appear in the original film, her character, Penny, was introduced in Top Gun through other characters’ dialogue about Maverick’s previous relationships.

6. Sundance winner Miles Teller plays Lt. Bradley Bradshaw, call sign “Rooster,” the son of Maverick’s late friend and Radar Intercept Officer Lt. Nick Bradshaw, aka “Goose.” Rooster’s father trusted Maverick; he isn’t about to make the same mistake. Teller took the role so seriously he even took seven weeks of piano lessons before shooting, so he could play for real in the scene in Top Gun: Maverick when Rooster, aping his old man in the original, sings ‘Great Balls Of Fire’ in the bar.

7. Glen Powell initially tested for Rooster but was instead offered the role of Hangman. He was so disappointed that he turned it down, until Tom Cruise talked him around.

8. Top Gun: Maverick was the biggest box office hit in South Africa in 2022, and the second biggest globally. It’s also Tom Cruise’s biggest blockbuster ever.

9. Top Gun: Maverick was an even bigger hit with critics, being named Best Movie, Best Wide Release Movie and Best Action & Adventure Movie at Rotten Tomatoes’ Golden Tomato Awards, which recognise the best reviewed films of the year. Top Gun: Maverick currently has a 96% rating from over 450 critics and a 99% audience score from over 50 000 fans on the site. It was also named the best film of 2022 by media as varied as Complex, The Globe and Mail, IMDb, People, The Telegraph, Total Film, Uproxx, and The Washington Post.

10. Top Gun: Maverick has won over 60 international awards and is one of the 100 top-rated films of all time on IMDb. In fact, the film was just nominated for six Oscars, including Motion Picture of the Year.

11. Renowned and highly successful Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton shares a friendship with Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise extended an invitation to Hamilton to play a fighter pilot in the film, but Hamilton had to turn it down due to his commitments to Formula One races and other obligations.

12. The production had the opportunity to shoot scenes on a few actual naval ships, with the USS Abraham Lincoln hosting the filming of flight deck scenes. Moreover, they secured the rental of both single-seat and dual-seat Super F-18 Super Hornets, along with naval pilots for the filming process. Notably, the production incurred a cost of over $11,000 per flight hour for these arrangements.

Well, there you have it, 12 interesting facts about Top Gun: Maverick. The film is currently streaming on Showmax in South Africa, so make sure that you check it out.

Check out the trailer for Top Gun: Maverick below:

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