Miles Teller plays Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, the son of Goose who was Maverick RIO in the original movie, and the relationship between Maverick and Rooster is the biggest driver in the film.
The photos in this post show the new Naval Aviators that Pete “Maverick” Mitchell will return to flight school to teach them a thing or two about speed ant the need thereof in Top Gun 2.
As Joseph Kosinski, Top Gun: Maverick’s director said in his first interview about the sequel to the 1986 blockbuster released to Entertainment Weekly, unlike the young pilots in the original movie, the trainees in Top Gun: Maverick are all previous Topgun (a.k.a. the United States Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program – SFTI) graduates.
“Those pilots were entering the Top Gun school for the first time,” Kosinski says of the original film’s characters, which included Maverick, Val Kilmer‘s Tom “Iceman” Kazansky and Anthony Edwards’ Nick “Goose” Bradshaw. “In our film, these are all Top Gun graduates who are coming back for a special training detachment — which is another aspect of Top Gun where they can go back for specialized training after they’ve already graduated. They’re at a different level of experience than in the first film.”
For the new characters, that meant eventually experiencing up to 1,600 pounds of force in F/A-18F Super Hornet strike fighters, which were specially outfitted with up to six IMAX-quality cameras to capture the actors as they pretended to pilot the planes (which were actually operated by a Navy pilot in the front seat).
“The experience is thrilling but very physically grueling,” Kosinski says. “The maneuvers that we were putting them through to tell this story were not something that you can just jump in and do. They all had to go through months of aerial training. We put them through a training course that Tom actually designed himself. He’s a licensed aerobatic pilot, and he was thrown into deep end when he did the first Top Gun without any training. So he knew that they would need to kind of work up to that level. So they started in Cessnas and then worked their way up aerobatic airplanes then into small single-engine jets before they were in the Super Hornet. Occasionally it made some of the actors sick and that even happens to experienced fighter pilots.”
“There’s no crew up there,” he adds. “I’m not up there with him, there’s no cinematographer, no hair and makeup. They are responsible for every aspect of the filmmaking process when they’re up in those airplanes.”
The most extreme sequence was glimpsed in the teaser trailer, where Maverick is flying across the desert at a rather insanely low altitude.
“For the sequence where Tom got to do some extreme low-altitude flying in this film, we had to get special permission from the Navy to do it,” he says. “It was one of the most extreme aerial sequences that we could come up with. Also, getting to do a real launch off a carrier and a real landing on a carrier — no one else has been able to ever do that in a movie before. Tom got to fulfill every kind of aviation dream that he had.”
Miles Teller plays Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, the son of Goose who was Maverick Radar Intercept Officer (RIO) in the original movie, and the relationship between Maverick and Rooster is the biggest driver in the film.
“The rivalry and relationship between Iceman and Maverick is one of those things that makes that first film so iconic,” he says. “It’s a relationship that is important to the Top Gun franchise and as a fan I would want to see how it’s evolved.”
The internet was set ablaze on Dec. 16, 2019 when the new trailer of Top Gun: Maverick debuted (the first one was released on Jul. 18).
The two-minute trailer boasts blockbuster scenes with Maverick taking to the skies in F/A-18 Super Hornet, F-14 Tomcat fighter aircraft and an ‘Area 51’-type jet.
Facing an uncertain future and confronting the ghosts of his past, Maverick is drawn into a confrontation with his own deepest fears, culminating in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those who will be chosen to fly it.
Top Gun: Maverick will hit theaters on Jun. 26, 2020.
Photo credit: Paramount via Entertainment Weekly
