Mission: Impossible star Hayley Atwell reveals how she kept up with Tom Cruise’s crazy stunts
Mission: Impossible star Hayley Atwell reveals the gruelling training regime she followed to take on Tom Cruise’s mad stunts.
When Hayley Atwell touches down in Australia this with her Mission: Impossible co-stars this weekend, she’ll be fulfilling a mission she set herself the last time she was here.
Sydney is the next stop on a whirlwind global promotional tour for the seventh chapter of the hit action-espionage franchise, Dead Reckoning Part One and Atwell will walk the red carpet with co-stars Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Pom Klementieff and director Christopher “McQ” McQuarrie at a glittering premiere on Monday night.
London-born, theatre-trained Atwell, whose screen credits include The Duchess, Cinderella and Christopher Robin, last visited the Harbour City in 2019 for Oz Comic Con, meeting fans of Peggy Carter, the soldier turned spy she’d played in Captain America: The First Avenger and its spin-off TV show Agent Carter. She’s been dying to get back ever since.
“What an incredible, incredible place,” she says of her visit. “The energy, the kindness of the people. It’s so beautiful going to the Opera House for the first time and looking at that skyline that I’d only ever seen in TV and in films.”
Atwell says it was her recurring role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that afforded her the “incredible privilege” of expanding her world view by “by meeting people from different backgrounds and cultures and perspectives” and says the experience takes her back to her early days treading the boards.
“I love the feeling of meeting audiences at conventions or premieres because I’m used to feeling that when I’m on stage and connecting with an audience,” she says. “You can see when a particular run of a play is landing because you can feel the response back and so being able to take this character and travel the world and actually see the people who are connecting to it gives me huge amounts of that energy back.”
Seven movies in and more than $5 billion dollars later, the Cruise-led Mission: Impossible movies also have a passionate following that’s been out in full force on the promo stops so far in Rome and London. More than four years in the making, with pandemic-associated delays – Dead Reckoning Part One will be the penultimate adventure for Cruise’s super-spy Ethan Hunt, with the direct sequel finale due for release a year from now.
The first Mission: Impossible, directed by Brian DePalma, was released in 1996 and each chapter since (including the 2000 second film directed by John Woo and filmed in Sydney) has gone to great lengths to outdo its predecessor, giving rise to some of the most spectacular stunts ever caught on film.
In previous films, Cruise, who famously does his own stunts, has scaled the side of the world’s tallest building and been strapped to the side of a plane as it took off – and the trailer for Dead Reckoning shows him upping the ante again by riding a motorbike off a cliff before parachuting to safety.
In a film environment dominated by seemingly indestructible superheroes whose mighty feats can often disappear in a blizzard of special effects and CGI, Atwell says it’s the human element that’s the key to the enduring appeal of the M:I franchise.
“This mainstream appeal is because it’s visually captivating and an extraordinary spectacle of really death-defying stunts … and all the stunts are real and they’re done with such a level of expertise and safety when it comes from the training involved and the stunt teams involved,” she says.
“Everything is always trying to push the envelope and do better than we’ve done before and I think that’s a very human quality.”
In addition to that, she says, in the midst of the jaw-dropping action scenes audiences in an era of murky politics and dirty wars respond to a story that “is essentially about friendship”.
“It’s about good versus bad or light versus dark, and that we can’t do this alone, and the self-sacrifice of the role of the hero and moving beyond one’s own fears, limitations or egos to contribute to the world and to be there for the world. That’s at the root of these stories – and that feels very human.”
Atwell’s mission for Dead Reckoning started more than a decade ago when McQ, who has helmed the franchise since 2015’s fifth film, Rogue Nation, saw her on stage in London and expressed a desire to work with her.
“There was a quality that I had on stage and he said, ‘I want that – I don’t know what to do with it but I want to do it justice by finding a place for it’,” Atwell recalls.
She read for a part in the director’s 2012 collaboration with Cruise, Jack Reacher, and was also considered for Rebecca Ferguson’s part in Rogue Nation, but the right opportunity finally came in the form of Grace, described as “a destructive force of nature” whose allegiances are unclear.
To prepare for the physicality of the role, Atwell trained full time for five months with expert athletes and world-class stunt men and women. The challenging, exhausting work paid off – not only did it give her confidence in her own ability so stay safe when “backflipping off a bridge”, but also for the stunts to become second nature enough that she could also act during them, rather than just execute them.
“I can do those things competently, safely and again and again and again and again, from multiple different angles, and then we can make a decision about if the director wants me to try one that’s slightly different in terms of performance, where she’s maybe more confident and strident or she’s more vulnerable, or she’s more unsure of how this physical stunt is going to work out for her character so there’s more apprehension.”
The fact that Cruise was by her side and so invested in every aspect of the filmmaking process also put her at ease, and made her feel welcome as a newcomer to the franchise.
“His attention to detail is so remarkable, and really humbling. And at the same time, I felt entirely safe with his vision and with what he was wanting to offer the audience. We know that he does his own stunts that he works incredibly hard and he is also known for his generosity and his kindness. And I’ve seen that every day now for nearly four years and I think it’s a very beautiful thing. I think he’s really an extraordinary human being.”
While there were rumours of romance with Cruise during the long Dead Reckoning shoot, Atwell (who is now engaged to music producer Ned Wolfgang Kelly) has said that the love she felt for her co-star was entirely “platonic”. Asked now to describe the relationship she has with her A-list co-star, Atwell says there was – and is – “a deep sense of professional respect”.
“I felt that I was working with someone who I had tremendous amount that I could learn from just by studying and watching him,” she says.
“He became a mentor for me in that way as he does with everyone who wants to learn. He is available to people who want to learn from him because he wants he wants cinema to thrive, and he wants it to live and he wants that to be the takeaway from anyone’s experience of working with him. It’s this sense of what a privilege it is to work in this industry, which brings so much joy and life affirming appeal to audiences. And long may that continue.”
Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One is in cinemas on July 13.
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Originally published as Mission: Impossible star Hayley Atwell reveals how she kept up with Tom Cruise’s crazy stunts
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