Mission: Impossible — Fallout star Rebecca Ferguson says action movies need more “cool chicks”
REBECCA Ferguson was thrilled to have some female company in Mission: Impossible — Fallout, and even happier not to have to do Tom Cruise’s next-level stunts
IN her breakout film role in Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, Rebecca Ferguson was pretty much the only woman in a sea of testosterone-fuelled, trigger-happy men.
Not that she took a back seat to any of them, mind you: her mysterious British agent character, Ilsa Faust, was introduced to audiences clad in a stunning ball gown, with a sniper’s rifle in her hand. For the rest of fifth chapter of Tom Cruise’s hugely successful M: I franchise she built on that compelling blend of glamour and danger, rappelling off buildings, tearing around on a motorbike and proving herself to be a fearsome, feisty and thoroughly modern action heroine.
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The next M: I instalment, Fallout, which opens around the world this week, makes some big strides towards evening up that gender balance, with a blend of new and returning characters. Ferguson now shares the screen with Michelle Monaghan, reprising her role from previous chapters as Cruise’s wife, Oscar-nominee Angela Basset as a tough-as-nails CIA director, and The Crown’s Vanessa Kirby as a shady black-market arms dealer.
Ferguson could not be happier with this development and figures that any correlation with Hollywood’s current push for more diversity and gender equality is entirely intentional. She’s generous with her praise for Fallout writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, who stated his intention “to bring a more feminine side to this movie” after the sausage-fests of M: I movies past, with Cruise’s super-spy Ethan Hunt surrounded by a blokey cadre of fellow agents including Simon Pegg’s Benji Dunn, Ving Rhames’ Luther Stickell and Jeremy Renner’s William Brandt.
“Chris brilliantly embraced what the world needs now — and that is not just one cool chick in a film amongst a bunch of men, it’s actually bringing lots of cool chicks,” says the effusive and endearingly sweary Ferguson over the phone from her seaside home in a small Swedish fishing village.
“I fell madly in love with Michelle Monaghan — she is fierce and brilliant and fun. Then Angela Basset — my God, if I could just have 10 per cent of her coolness, I’d be the happiest woman in the world. She’s just bloody brilliant. Vanessa Kirby is as well.”
Scoring the part of Faust in Rogue Nation was a big deal for the 34-year-old Ferguson, who last month gave birth to a baby girl, a brother for her 11-year-old son Isaac. The bilingual actor — born to a Swedish father and a British mother — began a modelling career at the age of 13, before moving into acting on Swedish TV and film, then going on to star in the BBC historical drama The White Queen, which earned her a Golden Globe nomination.
She made her Hollywood debut opposite Dwayne Johnson in the 2014 sword-and-sandals hit Hercules. After Rogue Nation took more than $800 million at the box office — with Ferguson singled out for special praise — the offers came flooding in.
Since then she’s appeared in Florence Foster Jenkins with Hugh Grant and Meryl Streep, sci-fi thriller Life with Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal, Scandi-noir book adaptation The Snowman and, most notably, Hugh Jackman’s surprise summer musical smash The Greatest Showman.
“It opened lots of doors,” Ferguson says of Rogue Nation. “Every job we do has a domino for what we hope will be a long-lasting career and Mission for me was obviously the one that opened the door to many, many more options. All of a sudden there were offers on the table and I thought, ‘This is bloody marvellous!’ It’s like getting a job without going in for an interview — how does this work?”
The Mission: Impossible films take particular pride in their insane stunts. In the last two instalments Cruise strapped himself to the side of a plane that was taking off and swung on the outside of Dubai’s 828m Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. Fallout promises to be no exception, with Cruise this time piloting a helicopter to do things never recommended in the instructions manual and executing a high-risk parachute sequence.
Cruise also famously shattered his ankle while leaping from a London building, shutting down the production for several months.
Ferguson remains in awe of her thrillseeking co-star and has no qualms about what might be required of her as far as stunts go.
“I know they are never going to be worse than Tom’s,” she laughs. “He will be doing the most difficult ones. All of us are wondering, how is going to top the one he just did? How can he get higher, or fiercer or worse? I just make sure to read the script bloody quickly and go ‘Am I next to him on the plane? Thank God, no. Am I flying a helicopter? Thank God, no’. Then I am game.”
Ferguson thrives on the physicality of the role. While she’s happy to let her stunt double do the more extreme work, she says a 25m free-fall that was cut from Fallout helped her conquer a fear of heights, while getting paid to be in top condition is a blessing this keen dancer never expected to have.
“My job is not just working on this film, but I get paid to learn martial arts, I get to be in incredible shape, I have someone putting my schedule together, someone picking me up and getting me to the gym and making me incredible food,” she says a little incredulously. “It’s such luxury if you like this kind of thing. And I love the training that comes with it — I love weapons training and the fight scenes. It just makes me so happy.”
Portraying a lethal weapon does occasionally give her delusions of grandeur, she admits.
“This sounds ridiculous, but sometimes when I have been out, my head will spin and I will think, ‘My God, if that guy just attacked me — what would Ilsa do? I would obviously go low, hit him between the legs, quickly get up and then …’”
She laughs uproariously and adds: “Then I realise I am not Ilsa — ‘Stop this right now and eat your ice cream and keep on walking’.”
At the other end of the scale, Ferguson played “Swedish Nightingale” Jenny Lind, the world’s finest opera singer, in The Greatest Showman.
The feel-good musical defied dire predictions to become a genuine word-of-mouth phenomenon, taking more than half a billion at the box office and spawning a soundtrack that is still riding high in the charts more than six months after the film was released.
Ferguson puts the runaway success down to the film’s vibrant colours, fresh score, uplifting message and, of course, the Hugh Jackman factor.
“Philosophers and other people have talked about this for decades and said that in times of war and where the world is today with a lot of disappointment and sadness, there are always musicals that bubble up,” she muses.
“They do well in times like this. I was a bit nervous — I read an article when it came out that said it wasn’t the true story of P.T. Barnum, it wasn’t what he was actually like and I thought, ‘Oh no, we haven’t done this justice’. But it still made an incredible impression, not just money wise, but people’s reaction to the movie.
“And it’s Hugh bloody Jackman, I mean, come on. Who doesn’t fall in love with him? God I would love to do it again. It was so much fun.”
Mission: Impossible — Fallout opens Thursday
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