After renewed scrutiny of the plane crash on the set of American Made that left two pilots dead and one without feeling in his lower body, Tom Cruise’s co-star Sarah Wright Olsen is defending the production, which is now the subject of multiple lawsuits, calling it “incredible about safety.” A lawsuit brought against the producers of the film from the families of Alan Purwin and Carlos Berl claims that Tom Cruise and Doug Liman wanted a “high-risk, action-packed motion picture,” which contributed to the circumstances that led to the crash. Not so, says Olsen: “[The team was] incredible about safety from everything that I saw,” she told People. “I actually flew with Tom in the movie and he’s an incredible pilot. They also checked things a thousands times over before we ever got in there.” Olsen plays Lucy, the wife of Cruise’s character Barry Seal, the real-life American pilot who smuggled drugs for Pablo Escobar and his cartel. Olsen said she’d left the movie’s set in Colombia at the time of the September 2015 crash. “Obviously my condolences go out to the families, it was a heartbreaking tragedy,” she told the magazine. “That was something that no one expected and it was a sad and horrible thing.”
Update: When asked to comment on the suit in a new interview with Vulture, Liman had this to say: “I don’t know anything specific about the accident, because it didn’t happen during the filming. They were just moving one of the airplanes. I was just going to say that it’s just a reminder — something all pilots know — which is that flying is really dangerous. Not in commercial planes, by the way. I don’t want to scare people who are about to get on a United flight. Being on a commercial airplane is actually one of the safest places you can be on the planet.”
