The sky is blue, water is wet, and Tom Cruise will always find a way to shoehorn a scene that revolves entirely around running as fast as he can into his movies. It’s one of life’s scant few inevitabilities, and very rarely is he willing to share the spotlight.

At least the veteran A-lister is on the joke, with his social media bio proudly proclaiming that he’s been “running in movies since 1981”. For whatever reason, once Cruise discovered that he could sprint faster than the average actor, it became a key part of his persona.

Alongside his habit of indulging in death-defying stunts, it simply doesn’t feel like a genuine Cruise star vehicle unless those arms of his are pumping rapidly as he pounds the pavement in either pursuit or escape. Mission: Impossible has become his favoured playground for the extended running sequence, but it was on an entirely different – and exponentially worse – flick that he broke his own cardinal rule.

There aren’t many actors who’d even dare approach cinema’s most famous sprinter and request to take part in his favoured pastime right alongside him, but Annabelle Wallis succeeded in shooting her shot. Part of the reason she was cast as the female lead in The Mummy in the first place was Cruise’s fandom of Peaky Blinders, so maybe that gave her the confidence to broach the unthinkable.

Fortunately for Wallis, despite initial protestations, she got to check a major item from her bucket list. “I ticked a box. I got to run on-screen with him, but he told me no at first,” she admitted to The Hollywood Reporter. “He said, ‘Nobody runs on-screen with me’. And I said, ‘But I’m a really good runner’. So, I would time my treadmill so that he’d walk in and see me run. And then he added all these running scenes.”

Understandably, Wallis described the opportunity to run side-by-side with Cruise as being “better than an Oscar,” and it’s a distinction that very few are ever offered. “I was so happy that I got to run on-screen with Tom Cruise,” she gleefully exclaimed, although it was a shame it had to happen in such a steaming turd of blockbuster mundanity.

On the plus side, Cruise’s excessive amounts of creative control gave Wallis the chance to live out her dreams, but it also contributed heavily to The Mummy being so terrible. Handed a massive amount of oversight to reshape the production in his own image, the end result was one of the worst films of his career and an embarrassing attempt at launching an entire shared universe that went so badly first-time director Alex Kurtzman completely washed his hands of it. Still, good for her.