Ryan Reynolds felt the need for speed, even as a 9-year-old.
The A-list actor plays a Navy fighter pilot who gets thrown into a sticky situation in the action comedy “Mayday” (streaming Sept. 4 on Apple TV). And in 1986, Reynolds was in awe watching Tom Cruise in similar dire straits in “Top Gun,” at a Vancouver movie theater alongside his older brother Patrick.
“It was just mind-blowing,” Reynolds, 49, says. "As a young kid, you were watching this movie where you never thought airplanes could be that cool. I was like, ‘Maybe if I'm lucky, I could marry an airplane. I don't know if anyone's ever joined bodies in such a way, but I'll find a way. I'll be so good to it. I'll treat it so great, I will never disrespect it.' ”
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Reynolds also loved how there was “such wish fulfillment” in “Top Gun,” he adds. Being a Canadian youngster at that time, “everything about America was just a little shinier, bigger, cooler, faster. And that movie was really the personification of that feeling for me."
Set in 1987 during the Cold War, “Mayday” stars Reynolds as Troy “Assassin” Kelly, a hotshot American pilot who gets tapped for a black-ops spy mission into Russia on the high-speed SR-71 Blackbird. The plane gets shot down and an injured Troy is rescued by Nikolai Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh), an ex-KGB agent and “Top Gun” super-fan who is Troy’s best chance of escaping Soviet forces and getting home.
“Mayday” pays homage to “Top Gun” in various ways, from how Troy and other pilots are treated like heroes in the USA to Nick quoting lines from the ‘80s classic after many viewings of his bootleg VHS copy.
Branagh, 65, who costarred with Cruise in the 2008 World War II thriller “Valkyrie,” has fond memories of seeing “Top Gun” for the first time as well. “It seemed to me the epitome of movies,” he recalls. “People in Europe would go, “ ‘Why do you call it a movie? It's a piece of cinema.’ I said, ‘No, in this case, this is a movie.’ ”
But Jonathan Goldstein, who wrote and directed “Mayday” alongside filmmaking partner John Francis Daley, saw an opportunity “to question some of the underlying suppositions” of a movie like “Top Gun” and “what it says about our culture,” he says. “I came of age in a time when we believed that the Soviet Union was this great evil, and that we were the good guys.”
Movies back then boasted “a relative level of simplicity,” Daley adds. “What we were trying to do is shine a light on the idea of fanaticism for that type of national pride and really kind of explore the people behind it.”
What Troy and Nick represent “are not necessarily who they are on the inside. One of them is your sort of stereotypical American hero (though) he isn't that much of a stereotype when you get to know him. He has these preconceptions that are blown (up) when he starts to get to know the enemy, and vice versa with Kenneth Branagh’s character.”
And like “Top Gun,” Branagh says, “Mayday” “knows what it is, and it will present it in the most full-blooded way.”
For the record, Reynolds did not embrace the Tom Cruise method for "Mayday" and fly around in an actual plane – filming in what was essentially a flight simulator was hairy enough. “It can feel very much so lifelike that your brain actually doesn't know the difference,” Reynolds says. “Now, Tom Cruise doesn't really use a flight simulator. He goes, obviously, just straight up ‘Top Gun’: ‘I’m just gonna hang off the side of this plane, and I'm gonna show you that I did it for real.’ ”
And Branagh has a fun story about how Cruise freaked out everyone by embracing his inner Maverick and flying a plane a little too close to a catering tent on the set of “Valkyrie.” “He buzzed the tower, and we were just having lunch in a quiet airfield in Germany,” Branagh says. “He was so close that you could see his face laughing like a hyena.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Ryan Reynolds says 'Top Gun' made him want to marry a plane
