Justin Bieber kicked off the week with a challenge to Tom Cruise. “I wanna challenge Tom Cruise to fight in the octagon,” wrote Bieber on Twitter. “Tom if you dont take this fight your scared and you will never live it down.” Embattled MMA star Conor McGregor seemed to back him up, as did Zack and Miri Make a Porno director Kevin Smith, who suggested that Bieber not “fight [Cruise] on a couch,” since “he can be bouncy.”
Clearly, none of these people have seen Mission: Impossible — Fallout, a film in which Cruise performs all his own death-defying stunts. On set, Cruise was hanging out of helicopters, executing multiple HALO jumps a day, and cruising through Parisian alleyways at extreme speeds. For an underwater escape sequence, Cruise trained himself to hold his breath for six minutes. And when he broke his ankle in a zip line stunt gone wrong, Cruise literally walked it off.
The guy’s a fucking machine, is what I’m saying, and Bieber never stood a chance. And although Cruise has yet to respond to the challenge, Bieber is already backing down. When paparazzi caught up with Bieber on Wednesday, the singer demurred: “It was just a random tweet, I do that stuff sometimes… I think he’d probably whoop my ass in a fight.”
He also clarified that Cruise has “got that dad strength,” whatever that means. Maybe Bieber would be more willing to face Cruise with backup from fellow strongman and “I Don’t Care” collaborator Ed Sheeran, who we already know is capable of kicking ass. Whatever Bieber’s reasons for initiating the challenge, it’s a good thing he wised up.
