Hayley Atwell Reveals the ‘Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning’ Stunt Moment That Was Improvised & Real

New M: me The film introduces Grace Atwell, or rather “Grace”, a thief who finds herself in the middle of Ethan’s (Cruise) mission to track down both halves of a key needed to control a self-aware artificial intelligence program called The Entity. In this mission, Grace gets into a Fiat 500 with her own mind, a train crashing down a gorge, and a number of other very dangerous situations.

Not only is Atwell an ace in the stunt department, she also excels at creating an extremely charming, layered and complex character on screen in the midst of all this mind-blowing action. It’s a feat that makes Grace feel real and helps keep her Dead Reckoning Part One somewhat mundane, which adds tenfold to the tension of the film.

WITH Mission: Impossible - Paying for Death, Part One now playing in theaters, Atwell took the time to join me on an episode Collider Women’s Night. We discussed formative experiences when she first started her career as an actress, including an extremely valuable two-week internship with a casting director, her perspective on making network television after working on Agent Carterand then jumped into some Mission impossible peculiarities.

Clearly, I think writer-director Christopher McQuarrie and the team got a stellar new M: me character in Grace, but not because that’s how she was scripted from day one. Instead, McQuarrie singled out a quality of Atwell’s work that he loved, and then they developed the character from there together. Atwell began:

“Chris McQuarrie saw me in the play ‘Pride’ at Trafalgar Studios in London 10 years ago and I met him later and he said there was a moment in the play where he said, ‘What she does, what she can do. gain access.” “I want it. I want it in the movies, but I don’t know in what capacity.” He told me this quite early when I got the part. He said, “We’ve been trying to find that moment for six years now.” Obviously it’s been 10 years because it took four years to make the movie. There’s a moment of vulnerability in the play for the character to really be held in that very quiet moment and it’s really beautiful and [director] Jamie Lloyd has created that space wherever he goes: “Dare every night to hold on to that emotion without saying anything and let the audience in that silence just experience what that character’s inner world is.” So I kind of boldly tried every night to prolong this pause, but not so much that it became indulgent or [get] people like: “Come on.” And that was the time I could find throughout the run [that] made the biggest impact.”

This desire to show viewers Grace’s inner world inspired Atwell to capture and flesh out a key component of the character, which would then allow her to combine thrilling action scenes with emotional complexity. It was Grace’s vulnerability. Atwell continued:

“So for McCue it was a shoot where my character Grace had a pretty vulnerable moment and I think that instinctively I started to be a lot more interested in the cost of what Grace went through and also the cost of being hyper-vigilant. and hyper, hyper independent in the world. And I found her wound, and what a wound it is, if we, as human beings, our survival depends on connection and attachment to our primary caregivers, then to our family, our friends, our society, our tribe, then the individual. who runs away from any possibility of connection because they don’t trust other people, comes from a place of survival that would be very lonely and rather painful to exist. conflict [with] what she and any person wants more than anything, friendship and kinship, is what she also fears the most, so she does not allow herself to feel it or trust. He creates this emotional impact. And that to me was like, “Oh, that’s her heart.” And then I was able to sort of work backwards, and all the fun stuff, all the frivolity and action was sort of on the surface, but then inside there was something more psychologically insightful in the game.”

Returning to the stunts, Atwell took a moment to talk about what it took to pull off two of the film’s most impressive moves, trying to survive a tumbling train in a gorge and driving a car speeding through the streets of Rome. Bye handcuffed to Tom Cruise.

Something that worked in Atwell’s favor? Drifting cars were natural to her. She explained:

“[Stunt Coordinator] Wade Eastwood always wants to see what my natural abilities are. For example, Pom Klementieff is great at high, high kicks, and she studied martial arts for many, many years, so it became a very specific stylized fighting skill that she was brilliant at. For me, the drift came very quickly and Wade said, “We’re going to use this.” So in everything that I reached a high level of competence, they said: “Okay, we will use this in the film.”

Atwell continued, remembering the moment she received a surprise guest in a helicopter while she was practicing drifting. It was, of course, Tom Cruise.

“I just learned how to drift and Tom came out of nowhere in a helicopter and suddenly went down and I looked in the mirror and Wade was like, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah. He just came to say hello. Play with him. He will follow you and you [drive[ the car,’ and I’m going, ‘Oh, my god!’ And he’s piloting the helicopter going like, ‘Hi! How you doing?’ I’m like, ‘I’m fine. This is intense.’ But I felt so safe doing it. And I think what working with those guys taught me is that you can perform recklessness, but be very in control of what you’re doing, and I would need that so by the time that we got to Rome where these obstacles have actually, you know, people around, older buildings, there’s higher stakes, these are real stunts, that we can do it, we can have a freedom to our performance, we could try lots of different things because we have the foundation of that discipline down.”

While Atwell had the necessary training and support to pull off the difficult stunt scenes, her own genuine fear really crept in at one particular moment, and ultimately that impromptu moment serves the character and the scene very well.

Mission: Impossible - Paying for Death, Part OneThe train scene is extensive, with quite a few wildly impressive scenes, but my favorite is the one in which Ethan and Grace hang on for dear life as the train slides off the rails and falls into a ravine. Here’s what Atwell had to say when asked about one moment in the scene that turned out to be the hardest:

“Let’s not spoil it too much, she’s hanging, she’s on a vertical train and he’s flying over the ravine and the piano is about to fall over and he’s saying ‘jump’. And this follows the moment when he has already jumped and says: “Jump.” You can see that she has adrenal fatigue, she knows that if she doesn’t she will die, but she also takes risks jumping because she might not survive. And then there’s a moment that was improvised and Tom really loved him and kept asking me to do it over and over again when he asked, “Do you trust me?” The first time I did it, I just went [uncertain] ‘Yeah?’ And it was all real, you know? I felt that I trust to himbut I didn’t know if Grace would be there at that moment. It was so much. And then take after take you have to jump over the train car, and it’s big. It’s a huge cylinder. It’s a vessel, a hollow vessel, and I have to jump, and he catches me with one arm and holds my weight as the piano rushes past us. It was timed to be safe so I was given a signal when my platform I was on started to break and it always scared me because it was going and I was off balance and then I had to jump and I wouldn’t have choice. I couldn’t decide at the time when to do it. You walk and don’t think about it, and that would always take my breath away.”

Can’t wait to hear more from Atwell about the creation Mission: Impossible - Paying for Death, Part One and Grace’s future in the franchise? You can find it on her main issue of Collider Ladies Night at the top of this article, or you can listen to the uncut interview in podcast form below: