Tom Cruise Cries in Lady Gaga’s ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Music Video for ‘Hold My Hand’ Ballad
Samantha Bergeson
The loss of Goose (Anthony Edwards) still haunts the “Top Gun” films, despite Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) flying high once more.
Oscar winner Lady Gaga announced original song “Hold My Hand” for “Top Gun: Maverick,” the sequel to the hit 1986 film, in theaters May 27. The “House of Gucci” star released the emotional music video for the ballad on May 6, ahead of the “Top Gun: Maverick” premiere at Cannes in a few weeks.
Director Joseph Kosinski filmed Gaga belting the moving single while at an airfield in the desert. Flashbacks to the original film, helmed by Tony Scott, revisit Goose’s heartbreaking death as Cruise’s Maverick holds him. The follow-up film is set 30 years after the original, with Maverick now training a detachment of TOPGUN graduates, including Goose’s son Lt. Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller) aka Rooster, for a dangerous, specialized mission.
The lyrics for “Hold My Hand” include: “I see that you’re bleeding / You don’t need to show me again. But if you decide to, I’ll ride in this life with you / I won’t let go ’til the end.”
“When I wrote this song for ‘Top Gun: Maverick,’ I didn’t even realize the multiple layers it spanned across the film’s heart, my own psyche, and the nature of the world we’ve been living in,” Gaga, who also contributed to the “Top Gun: Maverick” score along with Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer, Lorne Balfe, and Harold Faltermeyer, tweeted.
The “A Star Is Born” Academy Award winner continued, “I wanted to make music into a song where we share our deep need to both be understood and try to understand each other — a longing to be close when we feel so far away and an ability to celebrate life’s heroes…This song is a love letter to the world during and after a very hard time.”
Lead star Cruise praised Gaga’s dedication to the film while on “The Late Late Show,” saying that the song “opened up the whole movie” and grounded the “emotional core” of the epic film.
“The song she’d written just fell right in and became, really, the underlying score and the heartbeat of our film,” Cruise said.
