From careful choreography and reshoots to a very lucky darts shot, Top Gun: Maverick’s thrilling bar scene was nearly as complex as the famed flying sequences.
away—with a pair of darts. “I hit two bull’s-eyes in a row, and Tom literally lost his mind as if I’d won the lottery and hugged me,” Powell recalls. “He’s like, ‘That was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!’”That deadly dart’s accuracy is the movie’s introduction of Powell’s cocky pilot Hangman, and opens the 11-minute sequence that unofficially kicks thesequel into high gear.
The Hard Deck bar was built from scratch, right on the beach in Coronado, but Kosinski says the scene was inspired by a very real place—the officers club at Top Gun school in Fallon, Nevada, which Kosinski visited while prepping for production in 2017. He made the same mistake Maverick does, putting his cell phone on the bar, and bought a round of drinks for everyone as punishment. “It was a really fun night, and it showed me that I had to have an officers-club scene in the film,” Kosinski says.
The sequence in the film required 100 actors in that very small space, and was filmed in two parts, when the crew returned to the set in the spring of 2019 to make a crucial adjustment to the relationship between Maverick and Penny. “We realized it needed to start from a different place,” Kosinski says. “So we went back and reshot most of their opening interaction so that they had been on and off over the years. The first version we shot they had not seen each other since 1985, which ended up being too much of a stretch.”By Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection.
At the Hard Deck, the action is mostly separated into two groups, with the young crop of pilots all coming together by the pool table while Maverick and Penny catch up at the bar. But Hangman briefly separates from his counterparts to cash in on Maverick buying a round, and razzes the “old-timer,” who Hangman doesn’t yet know is his instructor. Still figuring out Hangman and how he wanted to approach him, Powell was worried that the character could easily just be viewed as a 2.
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