Tom Cruise wins Lifetime Achievement Oscar: Hollywood star who scaled Dubai’s Burj Khalifa finally honoured

For Dubai, Tom Cruise has always been more than a Hollywood A-lister — he’s the action legend who once clung to the Burj Khalifa with his bare hands and rewrote the rules for blockbuster filmmaking in the UAE. Fourteen years after that iconic stunt turned Downtown Dubai into the world’s biggest movie set, the superstar has scaled another peak: a lifetime achievement Oscar.

Cruise received an honorary Academy Award at the Governors Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday night, a milestone that arrives after decades of nominations but no previous wins. The honour recognises his 45-year career, his influence on global cinema and his unwavering championing of theatrical experiences at a time when streaming has reshaped Hollywood.

Academy president Janet Yang praised Cruise’s “incredible commitment to our film-making community, to the theatrical experience, and to the stunts community,” adding that his leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic — particularly while filming Mission: Impossible 7 — helped keep the industry afloat.

For audiences in the UAE, however, Cruise’s legacy shines brightest through that unforgettable 2011 sequence in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, where he scaled the Burj Khalifa in a stunt still considered one of the boldest ever attempted. Dubai residents vividly remember seeing him perched 130 floors above Sheikh Zayed Road, waving between takes and drawing global attention to the emirate’s cinematic potential. That moment cemented his status as an honorary Dubai action hero — fearless, meticulous and larger than life.

Onstage at the Governors Awards, Cruise reflected on the wonder that first drew him to filmmaking. “I remember that beam of light just cut across the room,” he said of his first time in a cinema. “Suddenly the world was so much larger than the one that I knew. It sparked a hunger — for adventure, for knowledge, to understand humanity, to tell a story.”

He was introduced by Oscar-winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who is currently working with Cruise on an untitled 2026 film. Calling the actor’s 45-year career impossible to summarise in “a four-minute speech,” Iñárritu described Cruise’s style as “meticulously choreographed but feeling completely improvised… structured like clockwork, but flowing like gas.”

The filmmaker also shared a typically intense Cruise moment: watching him devour chilli peppers “like popcorn,” while he — “a proud Mexican” — cried after a single bite. “Standing next to Tom,” Iñárritu joked, “you start to wonder if the rest of us belong to a completely different, rapidly decaying species.”

“This may be his first Oscar,” he said, “but it will not be his last.”

The Governors Awards also honoured country music icon Dolly Parton and pioneering production designer Wynn Thomas, but the night undoubtedly belonged to Cruise — a man who has always pushed cinema to its limits, whether soaring off cliffs, hanging from planes, or dangling off the world’s tallest tower.

As he accepted the honour that has long eluded him, Cruise was characteristically simple:
“Making films is who I am.”