CULTURE

Danika Yarosh Learned How to Fly a Plane From Tom Cruise

Just among many lessons, surely, from the budding actress’s Jack Reacher: Never Go Back co-star.


Danika Yarosh - Who opener - September 2016
Photographs by Thomas White side, Styled by Jessica de Ruiter; Hair by Ramsell Martinez for Bumble and Bumble at Streeters; makeup by Jeffrey Baum for Lancome; photography assistants: Colin Smith, Ed Mumford; fashion assistant: Raina Silberstein.

Even before she arrived on the Louisiana set of the action blockbuster Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, out next month, Danika Yarosh, 17, had already been thinking about getting her pilot’s license. And, of course, her costar Tom Cruise, who plays Reacher, is well-known for his willingness to get behind the wheel of just about anything. “Tom is really passionate about flying, so he gave me some tips and tricks,” Yarosh says. “He took me underneath his wing from the beginning.” The New Jersey native makes her feature-film debut as a fiercely precocious orphan who may or may not be Reacher’s daughter—but who does, at the very least, share his fearlessness. “It’s just so freeing and peaceful,” says Yarosh of the time she spends up in the air. “I’m flying a Cirrus SR20, one of the only planes with a parachute in it. It’s supersede!”