Top Gun: Maverick was the long-awaited return of one of the biggest blockbusters in movie history, and the box office did not disappoint. The film was full of incredible aerial action, but not all the action was in the skies. One particular scene in the film with Jennifer Connelly was reshot at Cruise’s insistence to make it more exciting, and it makes a lot of sense.
Jennifer Connelly plays Penny in the Top Gun: Maverick cast, a former love of Tom Cruise’s Pete Mitchell who reconnects with the pilot when he returns as an instructor at the Top Gun school. Their scenes in the film are certainly not the most exciting. They’re the romantic subplot. However, Connelly tells Vanity Fair that the first version of one scene with them, where the characters go sailing together, was killed off by Cruise because it was “boring.” Connelly explained…
Originally, we shot a sailing scene in San Diego. It was a beautiful, beautiful boat. We saw dolphins. It was great. We did the scene, we’re sitting out there, and Tom goes, ‘No, this is boring.’ I was like, ‘Oh.’ [Laughs] He was like, ‘It’s not fast enough. It’s not cool enough. It’s not fast enough. I want Penny to be like, really strong’ and he was right.
The sailing scene has Connelly’s character Penny in control of the boat as she and Maverick spend a day on the water. However, Cruise didn’t like the fact that the seas were calm. He felt it didn’t show enough that Penny was a capable sailor. To that end, the scene changed locations and was reshot in a place with rougher seas, to show Penny as stronger and to make for a more interesting scene. She continued…
We went to San Francisco, where it’s super windy, and it was an entirely different experience. We’re like getting soaked, and the wind. It’s so much better. And, like I was saying, we don’t have that much time with those characters to establish who they are. So a gesture like that, she’s sailing a boat and it’s calm and lovely versus she’s sailing this boat, and it’s this really like high-octane adrenaline experience. I think it was a great choice.
Director Joe Kowalski says the sailing scene was the hardest one in Top Gun: Maverick to shoot, and that it was shot three times, not just two, to get it right.
As Jennifer Connelly points out, there isn’t a massive amount of screentime dedicated to Penny or her relationship with Maverick, so every second counts. This could have been a sweet romantic scene with two people spending a day on the water, but they wanted to convey more information, and for that, they needed an entirely different version of the scene.
This was the right call. Penny is presented as a stronger character by making this relatively simple change, and as an audience member, the scene is just more interesting than it would be otherwise. It shows that Penny is more capable on the sea than Maverick. Despite being in the Navy, he’s not comfortable on the water.
With Top Gun 3 currently in development, and Jennifer Connelly interested in returning, perhaps we’ll see more of her character’s sailing skills in the future.