Last week, we covered Tom Cruise and his Everlasting Youth at both the Dubai and Moscow premieres of Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, and here’s Tom at the film’s premiere in Munich, Germany. To date, Tom’s had an interesting relationship with Germany including an embarrassingly rambling speech that he gave at the Bambi awards. He then played a Nazi in Valkyrie but required journalists to like Valkyrie and read a letter about how Germany hasn’t banned Scientology before he’d even talk to them. Never mind that Scientology doesn’t have status as a religion in Germany, right?

But let’s talk about these premiere pictures for just a moment. In the photo above, Tom is flanked by director Brad Bird as well as fellow actors Paula Patton and Simon Pegg along with producer Bryan Burk, but there’s still been no sign of either Jeremy Renner or Katie Holmes on this promotional trail. Very strange, indeed. It must also be noted that Tom’s rather underdressed for this premiere. I mean, we all know that he loves his jeans and faux-steel-toed lifts, but he could have made more of an effort to match the style of his co-stars for this event. Still, at least he’s wearing heels to match those of Paula Patton:

Oh and if you weren’t already aware by now, Tom does his own crazy stunts in this movie. As far as I can tell, that’s been the main selling point for this fourth installment to the Mission: Impossible franchise. Well, other than Ethan Hunt (presumably) handing the reins over to Renner’s character, but Renner isn’t even around for the international premieres. So basically, it’s all about Tom’s crazy stunts atop the Burj Khalifa, which is located in Dubai and is currently the tallest building in the world:

There’s actually a plot point to this madness though, if that even matters. In the movie, Ethan Hunt has been tasked with finding stolen nuclear launch codes from the nefarious Russians, who have hidden them inside a secure server room located within the Burj, so Hunt scales the side of the building to a height of half a mile. Oh, and that’s not all. While Cruise was on a break from filming, he climbed even higher to the spire of the building and left a little love note to Katie. This info comes courtesy of a NY Post article that’s hilariously titled, “The height of insanity!”

A pop-culture oddity is hiding some 2,700 feet above the baking Dubai desert. Atop the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, and its 160 stories of glass filled with condos, hotels and offices, sits a thin, white spire that seems to puncture the sky. This is the highest any person can get on a man-made structure on the planet and more than double the height of the Empire State Building.

And there, scrawled 15 feet from the very top of the spire, is Tom Cruise’s autograph. Not that you or anyone else on the planet will ever see it. But it’s there, his name and a doodled heart with an inscription to his wife, Katie Holmes, and children.

Cruise used the Burj Khalifa as the signature set piece in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, the fourth movie in the franchise, which launches in a limited IMAX-only engagement Friday before turning up in theaters nationwide on Dec. 21.

The action star took a break from filming one day to navigate a series of elevators, steep staircases and 200 feet of vertical ladder to make his way to the very top of the building’s spire. He was harnessed and lowered down the outside to make his graffiti. All of this for something that wasn’t filmed and won’t even be in the movie.

“The only person who will ever see [his signature] is the guy who paints the building some day,” says Mission stunt coordinator Gregg Smrz.

Even for Cruise, a notorious adrenaline junkie, the vertigo-inducing Burj sequence will probably go down as one of the craziest things he has ever done. And we all saw him jumping on Oprah’s couch, right?

Producer J.J. Abrams, who directed the third installment, first saw the Burj during a 2009 Star Trek promotional tour and had the idea to film something there. He passed it along to director Brad Bird, and Bird and the Ghost Protocol crew originally planned to shoot the stunt on a soundstage, with Cruise climbing a replica of the building.

Finding someone to insure the film, when the leading man was going to be dangled like a cat toy thousands of feet off the ground, was also an issue.

“Our stunt person’s first safety briefing lasted five hours and the insurance company insisted that anyone hanging outside a window had to have on a parachute,” Cruise said at the Dubai Film Festival last week. “We got a new safety officer.”

The crew originally planned to knock out just one window on the 123rd floor to stick a camera crane through. They ended up removing 15 to 20 — no small matter in a building that size, where howling winds sweep through the openings and disturb the elevators.

Once the windows were cut, a safety perimeter was established with red tape. Anyone inside it had to wear a harness. Cruise was fitted with one and strung up by wire attached to various points along the building. He moved across the facade with a combination of the rigging and his own energy.

Before he stepped outside for the first time, Cruise admits that falling crossed his mind. His wife couldn’t bear to watch, and went off shopping instead.

Cruise apparently had an utterly practical, Zen philosophy on the Burj sequence.

“Tom’s whole point of view was that once you get above 50 feet or so, it doesn’t really matter if you fall. The results are the same,” Bird says. “The only difference is, you have longer to think about it on the way down.”

[From NY Post]

Isn’t it interesting how Katie went shopping to avoid watching Tom doing his manic, insane stunts on top of the Burj? That’s basically how she deals with life since getting together with him. Very romantic stuff.

As for Tom’s adrenaline-junkie status, part (if not all) of his fearlessness can be attributed to his beliefs as a Scientologist. As an achiever of (or as a guy dumb enough to pay for) OT Level VIII, Cruise believes that he’s been bestowed with amazing powers including but not limited to telekinesis and “basically the ability to make anything in the physical universe happen just with the use of [his] mind.” And since he also necessarily believes in reincarnation, there’s always the next life to look forward to if he happens to fall off the tallest building in the world.

No word though on whether he can take all that crap that’s been injected into his face into the next life.

Photos courtesy of fame and AllMoviePhoto