Top Gun: Maverick Interview - Meet The New Recruits

thegamer.com:

'It's not the plane, it's the pilot' is a recurring line in Top Gun: Maverick, and we see the students of the flight school play a much bigger role in the long-awaited sequel than in the original, which revolved mostly around Maverick, Goose, and Iceman. For example, the pilot in the second seat of Maverick's jet in the ending of the 1986 movie is double Oscar winner Tim Robbins, but nobody seems to remember that because the rest of the pilots get little-to-no screentime. Top Gun: Maverick strives to fix that, with six or seven of the 12-strong class being actively involved in the movie's story and making it feel so much richer. Ahead of the movie's premiere, I caught up with three such recruits: Greg Tarzan Davis (callsign: Coyote), Jay Ellis (Payback), and Danny Ramirez (Fanboy), to see if it really is the pilot. Sections of this interview have been trimmed and edited for clarity.

TheGamer: One of the things that people really loved about the first Top Gun movie was the beach scene, and you guys recreated that in this movie with the air for dogfight football. That must have been a really fun day compared to some of the more intense flying sequences?

Danny Ramirez: It was a combination of both, though, because of the pressure. For instance, Glen [Powell, callsign: Hangman] started training with a personal trainer before we started filming, and his first thing on his Instagram post was 'montages last forever'. So I think that's at the stakes of what that moment was like. He looked shredded you could see, every vein that it was like, 'okay, the bar is set up high'. So that day the relief came once we finished that day.

Related: Top Gun: Maverick Review

Jay Ellis: But there were a lot of push ups. Between takes, there was