Top Gun star Kelly McGillis makes rare appearance after admitting she wanted cameo in the sequel 32 years on

Top Gun’s leading lady Kelly McGillis was spotted near her home as the Top Gun sequel begins filming.

Tom Cruise is back as Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell in the movie but Kelly will not return to Top Gun 2.

The 60-year-old actress won hearts playing Charlie Blackwood in the 1986 original – and previously said she’d love to return.

But Kelly has not travelled to the film set in San Diego, California along with her former cast mates.

Instead, she spent her weekend volunteering at the First Congregational Church, near her rural home in Hendersonville, North Carolina.

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Since the hit movie, Kelly has given up acting in big Hollywood films and instead ran a bar in Key West, Florida.

She also worked with drug addicts and alcoholics and taught aspiring actors her former craft before returning as a character actress in indie film projects.

When asked in 2014 if she’d return as Charlie, she told the Independent : “Yeah, I’d cameo in it maybe!”

Fans of the film will be pleased to hear Top Gun 2 will be arriving in cinemas on July 12, 2019 – 33 years after the original.

The new film will be set in a world of drone technology and fifth generation fighters along with exploring the end of the era of dogfighting.

The Mission Impossible star said recently the title would be Top Gun: Maverick.

Maverick was Cruise’s character’s nickname in the film in which he played Naval aviator Lt. Pete Mitchell.

The original film, directed by the late Tony Scott and set at the Navy’s Fighter Weapons School at Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego, was a massive hit with more than $350 million in worldwide grosses.

Val Kilmer, Tom Skeritt and Anthony Edwards also starred in the original, in which the protagonists flew the F14A Tomcat. Kilmer has said he’d like to return for the sequel in the role of Tom “Iceman” Kazanski.

Cruise had been working with Tony Scott on the sequel before the director’s demise in 2012.

In 2015, the United States Library of Congress selected Top Gun for preservation in the National Film Registry as one of the 25 films named annually that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant.

Cruise met with potential directors for the Top Gun sequel last year prior to and while filming Mission: Impossible 6 in London.

Oblivion was a success for Cruise and Kosinski, bringing in $286 million worldwide.