These days you’re just as likely to see Tom Cruise hanging off the side of a plane as you are to see him piloting one, but he had to start somewhere.
Cruise first planted the seeds of his future action hero status in 1986’s Top Gun when he played lovable rogue (and not just because he plays beach volleyball in jeans) Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, costarring with Val Kilmer, AnthonyEdwards, sleek jets, a perfect soundtrack, a bar-room serenade and endlessly quotable dialogue.
It took 36 years for a sequel to land in theaters, but not least because Cruise was a little busy making so many movies, including eight Mission: Impossible films, the seeming franchise-capper The Final Reckoning in theaters now.
But if he still feels the need for speed, Top Gun: Maverick‘s $1.5 billion at the global box office in 2022 was proof that Cruise still knows how to take an audience’s breath away without his IMF team.
The blockbuster sequel was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture, and won one, for Best Sound. (Though shouldn’t there be an honorary award for pulling off the impossible and saving movies?)
And while he was snubbed for his true-to-form performance as an older, wiser but still stubborn AF Maverick, Cruise still picked up a nomination as a producer on the film, which landed in theaters a few years behind schedule because foregoing IMAX screens and that collective lovin’ feeling was not an option for the cineaste.
The original Top Gun made $354 million worldwide, put director Tony Scott on the map and inspired countless future fighter pilots. (And it’s an Oscar winner, taking home Best Original Song for Berlin‘s “Take My Breath Away.”)
So, Paramount was banking on a hit.
And it turned out that Maverick’s return as a promotion-resistant flight instructor tasked with training the incoming class of Top Guns, at least one of whom (ahem, Goose’s son) is not impressed, was just the shot of adrenaline the post-pandemic box office needed.
For his next trick, Cruise was dead set on getting Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning into theaters in 2023. Which he did, and the $4 billion franchise showed it was aging as well as its star, scoring the series’ first-ever Oscar nominations, for Best Visual Effects and Best Sound, in 2024.
But the franchise that is Cruise’s career had to start somewhere. And though you’ve since been treated to a whole new crop of call signs, keep scrolling to see where it all began and what Cruise and the rest of the crew from 1986’s Top Gun look like now:
Tom Cruise
Maverick may be the oldest guy in the squad, but he’s looking none the worse for wear since Tom Cruise‘s first test flight as the best Navy pilot in the land.
He has since amassed three Oscar nominations for acting (for Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire and Magnolia); three Golden Globe statues (wins for those same three movies) that he later returned on principle; eight Mission: Impossible movies; many, many other film credits; and the achievement of iconic movie star status.
The father of Connor, Isabella and Suri Cruise has also tirelessly powered through three divorces, from Mimi Rogers in 1990, Nicole Kidman in 2000 and Katie Holmes in 2012.
Kelly McGillis
Astrophysicist and Top Gun instructor Charlie Blackwood took Maverick’s breath away, but Kelly McGillis didn’t return for 2022 sequel. And she almost didn’t make it into the original film, either.
“I didn’t want to do it,” she told The Guardian in 2001. “But because I’d done Witness, I owed Paramount another film, and my agent said, ‘You have to do this.’ I took one look at it and said, ‘This is like a Western in the sky—I don’t wanna do this.’ It wasn’t about acting, it was about being a cartoon character. You know what I mean? I could have done it blindfolded. I was grateful for the fact that it gave me opportunities I wouldn’t otherwise have had.”
She’s also known for The Accused and kept acting in The Babe, North and more, but she put acting on the back burner and opened a restaurant in Florida with her yacht mogul second husband, Fred Tillman.
She has two daughters with Tillman, whom she divorced in 2002. She had a civil union ceremony with Melanie Leis in 2010, but they broke up the following year.
“I think just my priorities in life changed,” McGillis told Entertainment Tonight in 2019 from home in North Carolina. “It wasn’t like a major decision that I made to leave [acting], it was just that other things became more important. I love acting, I love what I do, I love doing theater, but I don’t know. To me, my relationships to other people became far more important than my relationship to fame.”
Val Kilmer
Val Kilmer was as cool as it gets as Maverick’s nemesis turned fellow hero in combat Lt. Tom “Iceman” Kazansky. And he returned for the sequel in a touching cameo, his character by then a four-star general who had Maverick’s rogue back for 30 years.
After the first Top Gun, Kilmer preceded to have one of the premiere acting careers of the 1990s, starring in Willow, The Doors, True Romance, Tombstone, Batman Forever, Heat, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Ghost and the Darkness, The Saint and The Prince of Egypt (as the voice of Moses and God).
Rumors swirled about the state of Kilmer’s health toward the end of the 2010s as he became more elusive and, in April 2020, he confirmed that he had survived throat cancer.
“You may notice I sound like I have a frog in my throat. It’s not. It’s a buffalo,” he wrote online ahead of an appearance on Good Morning America, his first TV interview in 10 years. “Though being healed from cancer, I am slowly and surely regaining my speech. As I haven’t let the adversity stifle my voice as an artist.”
Kilmer shared two children, daughter Mercedes and son Jack, with ex-wife Joanne Whalley, and he opened the door into his private world for the critically acclaimed 2021 documentary Val.
Increasingly frail in his final years, Kilmer died of pneumonia on April 1, 2025, at the age of 65.
Anthony Edwards
Goooooooose! Anthony Edwards was known primarily as Maverick’s doomed wingman, Officer Nick “Goose” Bradshaw, for a good eight years before he landed the role of Dr. Mark Greene on ER. Over his eight-year run on the show before his tearjerker of a farewell, Edwards won a Golden Globe and was nominated for four Emmys.
He won an Emmy in 2010 as an executive producer of that year’s Best TV Movie, Temple Grandin.
Edwards’ acting work on the big and small screens over the years has included The Client, Northfork, Zodiac, Showtime’s Billions, Law & Order: True Crime and Designated Survivor, and he’s streaming in the inspired-by-true-scandal dramas WeCrashed and Inventing Anna.
He has four children with ex-wife Jeanine Lobell, the founder of Stila Cosmetics, whom he was married to from 1994 until 2015. He married Emmy winner Mare Winningham, who also has four kids, in 2021.
“When I do get recognized,” Edwards told Esquire in 2022, “it’s generally just a nod and a how are you doing. I took such a time out that the things that people know me for, Top Gun and ER and all that, those were a long time ago. I get that classic thing of like, ‘Oh my God, my mom and dad used to watch you.'”
Meg Ryan
After her emotional supporting role as Goose’s wife, Carole, Ryan’s career took off. After solid supporting turns in Innerspace and D.O.A. (both with future husband Dennis Quaid, whom she married in 1991), she starred in When Harry Met Sally… and the title of America’s Sweetheart soon followed.
She had classic rom-com chemistry with Tom Hanks in Joe vs. the Volcano, Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, as well as other adorable moments in French Kiss, I.Q. (with Top Gun‘s Tim Robbins) and Kate and Leopold. Ryan also Jim Morrison‘s long-suffering partner Pamela Courson in The Doors (opposite Kilmer as the volatile rocker), an alcoholic wife and mom in When a Man Loves a Woman, an Army captain whose death is posthumously investigated in Courage Under Fire, and a wife trying to get her husband back from kidnappers with the help of professional rescuer Russell Crowe in Proof of Life.
Most recently she directed herself and David Duchovny in the romance What Happens Later.
“What I had in the ’90s was a ride,” Ryan told Glamour in 2023. “It was a kind of moonshot and was really fun, but it’s just one ride out of the billions of things you could be interested in.”
Ryan and Quaid divorced in 2001. Their son JackQuaid has followed them into acting, and Ryan also adopted daughter Daisy in 2004.
Tim Robbins
After getting his start on TV shows like St. Elsewhere, The Love Boat and Hill Street Blues, Tim Robbins made his film debut in the teens vs. terrorists action movie Toy Soldiers and carpooled with John Cusack in The Sure Thing before landing the role of Lt. Sam “Merlin” Wells.
He was in Howard the Duck but then his career took off after he plays an eager minor league pitcher vying with Kevin Costner for Susan Sarandon‘s heart in Bull Durham.
He got the girl in real life, and he and Sarandon were together for 21 years and had two sons, Jack and Miles, before amicably splitting up in 2009. He also directed Sarandon in her Oscar-winning turn in 1995’s Dead Man Walking and was also behind the camera for Bob Roberts and Cradle Will Rock.
Throughout, Robbins has remained politically active, he founded the Actors’ Gang Theater Group, and he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 2004 for Mystic River. A further sampling of his screen highlights includes Jacob’s Ladder, The Player, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Shawshank Redemption, Arlington Road, HBO’s The Brink, Dark Waters, Hulu’s Castle Rock and Apple TV+’s Silo.
Adrian Pasdar
Fresh-faced Lt. Charles “Chipper” Piper marked the movie debut of the future star of Heroes, Colony, Political Animals, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and much more. And if you weren’t seeing Adrian Pasdar, you heard him as the voice of Tony Stark/Iron Man in his own animated series and assorted other Marvel shows, including Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H., Ultimate Spider-Man and Avengers Assemble.
In the flesh he’s also been on the small screen in Lethal Weapon, Grand Hotel and Supergirl.
Pasdar shares two sons with ex-wife Natalie Maines. He and The Chicks singer married in 2000 and she filed for divorce in 2017; the split was settled in 2019.
Michael Ironside
Michael Ironside‘s name alone is tough. And sure enough, Lt. Cmdr Rick “Jester” Heatherly, Maverick’s flight instructor, had a gaze of steel.
Ironside is a prolific character actor who, since Top Gun, has showed up in movies such as (to name a few) Total Recall, Starship Troopers, The Next Karate Kid, The Perfect Storm, The Machinist, Terminator: Salvation, and X-Men: First Class, as well as on TV in Walker, Texas Ranger, ER, Cold Case, Castle, Smallville, Community, Vegas, The Flash, Justified, The Alienist, Hawaii 5-0… and the list goes on. Most recently he appeared in The Dropout and Barry.
He’s been married to his second wife, Karen Dinwiddie, since 1986 and has one child with her and another from his previous marriage.
Tom Skerritt
You may know him as Julia Roberts‘ dad in Steel Magnolias (or Sara Gilbert‘s dad in Poison Ivy—lots of father roles and foliage), but before that Tom Skerritt was Cmdr. Mike “Viper” Metcalf, the voice of reason who helps Maverick, racked with guilt over Goose’s death, recover his confidence.
Born in 1933, Skerritt has been acting since the 1960s and had previously starred in the likes of MASH and Alien, so just add Viper to his list of classic roles. He remained a go-to guy for law enforcement, military men and politicians, whether it was his cameo as the mayor of Seattle in Singles, playing Sheriff Brock on Picket Fences (for which he won an Emmy for Lead Actor in a Drama in 1993), having a turn as Sen. Carrick on The West Wing, his arc as a CIA agent on The Grid or showing up as a bureaucratic scientist in Contact.
He had a recurring role as the deceased but often-referred-to Walker family patriarch on Brothers & Sisters and appeared on The Good Wife and Madam Secretary. More recently he played a terminally ill retired heart surgeon who returns to his hometown in a feature adaptation of David Guterson‘s novel East of the Mountains and the patriarch of a gun-slinging family in the western Catch the Bullet.
Skerritt had three children from his first marriage, a son from his second and a daughter with third wife JulieTokashiki, his spouse since 1998.
(Originally published May 16, 2020, at 7 a.m. PT)
