‘Mission: Impossible 7’ Star Hayley Atwell Talks Hanging Off a Train with Tom Cruise and Female Representation in Action Movies

The adage of Hollywood and or pundits who closely follow Hollywood, writers, armchair analysts, etc., is that you should always have a plan and never just “make it up as you go.” Filmmaking is such a massive endeavor and a massively expensive endeavor, a plan to execute all the ambitious things you want to do is critical, and it’s why some big films feature massive and extensive pre-production periods: precisely to map out and work out how to pull all that stuff on in advance so on the day of shooting, no one is wasting money.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” now playing in theaters. “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’s” jaw-dropping train sequence in the film’s third act features Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt fighting Esai Morales’ Gabriel on the roof of a locomotive as it hurtles down a track at 60 mph. The set piece was originally supposed to be much longer. The scene climaxes with the train plunging off a bridge one carriage at a time during which Ethan and Grace (Hayley Atwell) cling on for dear life as they climb back up through the train.

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” now playing in theaters. The “Mission: Impossible” movies have no shortage of death-defying stunts, but the Tom Cruise-starring action franchise is known for another iconic magic trick: its mask reveals. “Dead Reckoning Part One” features two mask reveals — in the first, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt uses a mask to infiltrate a meeting between CIA director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) and officials from various intelligence agencies about a rogue artificial intelligence system, known as the Entity. The other is a face swap between Hayley Atwell’s Grace, a pickpocket who becomes embroiled in IMF’s hunt for the Entity, and Vanessa Kirby’s black-market arms dealer Alanna Mitsopolis, aka the White Widow.

“Mission Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One” and one of the revelations of the film, at least if you haven’t been paying attention over the years, is Haley Atwell, a huge scene stealer, who matches Tom Cruise beat for charming beat within the film. For many, she’s the real find and gem of the film, the discovery if you maybe haven’t seen much of the other work.

Tom Cruise’s "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning" co-stars have revealed the "thoughtful" gifts the 61-year-old star gave them during filming, and they are fitting of an action hero.  "He's always very keen to show his appreciation," Simon Pegg, who also starred with Cruise in the last four "Mission: Impossible" films, told People magazine. "I think he's so used to being the focus of attention, it's naturally his instinct to kind of reflect everything back.

SATURDAY PM UPDATE: Facts are facts, and Paramount/Skydance’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One set a 5-day opening domestic record for the franchise with $80M, we hear.

Todd Gilchrist editor Named after a word that sounds similar in Korean to both “spring” and “tiger,” Pom Klementieff has appropriately showcased ebullience and viciousness throughout her career — and especially in the past few months. In May, she reprised her role as Mantis in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” empathetically shepherding her fellow outcasts through an adventure to save Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) from unapologetic MCU villain the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji). She also appears in “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” as Paris, a ruthless assassin who will stop at nothing to kill Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and anyone else who gets in her way. Ahead of “Dead Reckoning Part One,” Klementieff spoke to Variety about her character in the film, whose backstory she worked closely with Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie to develop. In addition to talking about how she “manifested” the opportunity to be a part of the franchise, she revealed the panorama of influences — from Jean-Paul Belmondo to animal videos on YouTube — she enlisted to ensure that audiences never forget Paris.

EXCLUSIVE: Hayley Atwell predicted that she’d be on strike now.

Todd Gilchrist editor Since “Mission: Impossible III” in 2006, Simon Pegg has been part of the core ensemble of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise, playing hacker and sometime field agent Benji Dunn opposite its stalwart star Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt. Pegg was never going to be the actor risking life and limb on screen — “it’s Benji’s job to be the one that actually says, ‘what the fuck are we doing here?’,” he observes. But over five installments of the indefatigable series, his character has shifted from questioning what Ethan is doing in the moment to believing absolutely in why he’s doing it, thanks in no small part to the writing and directing of Christopher McQuarrie. McQuarrie came onto “Ghost Protocol” as “a sort of master plumber to re-wriggle the pipes,” as Pegg characterizes it, and since became the series’ ongoing co-architect with Cruise. Their partnership reaches its peak, even if by all indications it’s far from over, with “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One,” half of an operatic culmination of narrative seeds planted since Cruise first played Hunt back in 1996. In a conversation with Variety, Pegg discusses what makes McQuarrie’s creativity so special, and his collaboration with Cruise et al so unique; he also talks about new details he discovered about Benji, explored the challenges of being self-referential in a franchise like this without undermining emotional stakes, and hinted at what is yet to come as he and the rest of the filmmaking team move on to “Dead Reckoning — Part Two.”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses the ending of “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” currently playing in theaters. “Dead Reckoning,” the seventh installment of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise, is the latest Hollywood blockbuster to be split into two movies, but Tom Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie tried their hardest to give “Part One” a non-cliffhanger conclusion. The filmmaker recently told Total Film magazine that thinking about how to conclude the first of two movies kept Cruise up at night during the filming of “Part One.” “Where we ended the movie was always where we were going to end it,” McQuarrie said of the train action sequence. “How we ended the movie was a big, big mystery for us. It kept Tom awake at night throughout production. He would come in all the time and say, ‘This can’t be a cliffhanger, it’s got to be satisfying.’ The audience has to feel a sense of completion.”

Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness.In the Marvel sequel from 2022, Atwell played Captain Carter, a new version of the character Peggy.After her character was teased to have a big role in the film, she actually ended up being killed off by Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) almost straight away after her introduction.Reflecting on the frustration of the brief cameo, Atwell told Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast: “I’m like, ‘That wasn’t my choice!’ When she was like, ‘I could do this all day’ and then followed by she’s immediately cut in half by a frisbee.“And the audience being like, ‘She can’t do it all day. Apparently you can’t, so, egg on your face.’ That doesn’t really serve Peggy very well.”She added: “I felt like I had much more to do in the What If…? animation series.

Something that’s brought up in a new Happy Sad Confused podcast with “Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning—Part One” star Hayley Atwell. The host of the podcast, Josh Horowitz, essentially says ‘Mission Impossible’ movies should not work.

Paramount/Skydance’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is off and running overseas with a $39.8M cume through Thursday in 48 international box office markets. This includes Wednesday openings in some markets and a strong paid preview program. With domestic’s Wednesday/Thursday plus previews, that brings the global total on the Tom Cruise-starrer to $$63.6M through yesterday.

Brent Lang Executive Editor “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” netted $8.3 million at the box office on Thursday, pushing the action sequel’s North American gross to $23.8 million after two days of release. The film, which finds Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt hurtling off cliffs, fighting knife-wielding bad guys on trains and evading pursuers while driving a Fiat through the streets of Rome, was incredibly expensive to produce. Shot during the pandemic (with all the attendant shutdowns, delays and health protocols that were a staple of the COVID era), the budget on the film ballooned to $290 million. So “Mission: Impossible” will need to generate a lot of repeat business if it’s going to turn a profit, and it needs to boom at the global box office.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One stars Simon Pegg and Rebecca Ferguson have revealed the secret Morse Code meaning behind the franchise’s theme.Speaking to NME, the pair shared that they were recently made aware of the secret while appearing the Today FM show Dermot & Dave, hosted by Dermot Whelan and Dave Moore.“This is an amazing fact,” began Pegg. “Dave from Dermot & Dave, an Irish Radio show told us that when Lalo Schifrin wrote the original music, the theme, [he put in] two dashes, two dots [which translates to] ‘MI’,” the actor explained while sounding out the tune.“Stop it, it’s true!” interjected Ferguson, who was equally as excited to share the little-known fact.Lalo Schifrin, an Argentine composer, recorded the M:I theme in 1967.

Tom Cruise appears ageless in his films. But Mission: Impossible-Dead Reckoning director Christopher McQuarrie was close to de-aging Cruise as a gimmick in the new film’s opening sequence.

Hayley Atwell‘s Peggy Carter made a glorious comeback in 2022′s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness only to be killed off within minutes of returning to the screen.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Hayley Atwell is currently kicking butt in “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” but the Tom Cruise-led action tentpole is not the actor’s first go-around with a Hollywood mega-franchise. Atwell joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Peggy Carter in 2011’s “Captain America: The First Avenger.” It’s a role she would flesh out in two seasons of ABC’s “Agent Carter” series, before lending her voice to an alternate version of Peggy in Marvel’s Disney+ series “What If…?” Atwell’s Peggy Carter is a passionate fan favorite among Marvel lovers, which is why fans were so delighted when the character popped up as an alternate Captain America in 2022’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and then made furious when she was almost immediately killed off by Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen). In a new interview on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast, Atwell called the cameo “a frustrating moment.”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” almost pulled an “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” by opening with an extended sequence featuring a de-aged version of its main star. “Dial of Destiny” de-aged Harrison Ford to mixed results for a 25-minute opener. “Dead Reckoning” director Christopher McQuarrie ultimately nixed an idea to de-age Tom Cruise because the technology just isn’t convincing enough yet. “Originally, there had been a whole sequence at the beginning of the movie that was going to take place in 1989,” McQuarrie told GamesRadar+ and Total Film. “We talked about it as a cold open, we talked about it as flashbacks in the movie, we looked at de-aging.”

Missions: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One stars Pom Klementieff and Vanessa Kirby were present when Tom Cruise performed one of the most dangerous stunts in cinema history – and they were understandably stunned.Speaking to NME, the pair explained how they watched Cruise drive a motorbike off the top of a cliff six times while shooting the franchise’s latest instalment. You can watch their full interview above.“It was mind-blowing,” said Klementieff, who stars in the film as French assassin Paris.Kirby, who reprises her role Alana Mitsopolis, added: “Everyone else was so nervous and fearful, and he wasn’t.

Tom Cruise still has every opportunity blast off into space.

Tom Cruise is ready to go where no actor has gone before. The 61-year-old star offered a recent update on an exciting project that is planned to be filmed in outerspace. In 2020, it was revealed that Cruise was working with NASA and Elon Musk's SpaceX on a movie that would be shot at the International Space Station.

Jordan Moreau Henry Czerny received a mission from filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie and chose to accept it. That mission? Return as former IMF chief Eugene Kittridge in “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” 27 years after he first appeared in the original “Mission: Impossible” in 1996. At the “Dead Reckoning” premiere in New York, Czerny said when he first got the call about returning to the “Mission: Impossible” world, he didn’t believe it. “I think it’s a joke at first because my reps called me and said they want to bring Kittridge back and I’m in the middle of doing my errands in Los Angeles and fighting traffic or shredding old tax documents,” he told Variety. “I think, ‘Okay, what’s going on really?’ They say, ‘Chris McQuarrie wants to talk to you about bringing Kittridge back,’ and I take it seriously. Two days later, I’m on a call with Chris McQuarrie.”

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Rome’s iconic monuments are getting lots of mileage in Hollywood movies this summer. Since May, the Eternal City has hosted the world premieres of “Fast X” and “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One,” two blockbusters that burned rubber and wreaked havoc on its cobblestoned streets. Universal held its “Fast X” red carpet in the Roman Forum’s Temple of Venus, with the Colosseum as a backdrop, in early May. Weeks later, Paramount descended for the June premiere of “M:I 7,” with Tom Cruise prancing down the same Spanish Steps that serve as the setting for spectacular car chases in both movies.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One has been released.Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, the first part follows Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his band of operatives as they chase down a key to deactivate a sentient AI device known as the “Entity”.Alongside returning cast members Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson and Vanessa Kirby, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One adds Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales and Pom Klementieff to the franchise.Lorne Balfe returns to compose the score for both parts of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning. He previously scored the sixth installment, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, while his other credits include Marvel’s Black Widow, Amazon series The Wheel Of Time and this year’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.You can stream the full soundtrack below.The original Mission: Impossible theme was written and composed by Lalo Schifrin in 1967.

Wondering if you should choose to accept the latest “Mission: Impossible” entry? Maybe you’re sick of all the bombast at the movie theatre lately? Well, put it another way: Do you really want to disappoint Tom Cruise?

Even Tom Cruise can’t believe some of the things he hears about himself. Cruise’s "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1" director, Chris McQuarrie, revealed in a new interview with the Times of London that the actor has heard some crazy rumors about himself, but was happy to debunk them. According to McQuarrie, he asked Cruise when they first met what the "weirdest story you’ve heard about yourself" was.  Cruise laughed and said it was the myth that people on set "were not allowed to look me in the eye." The first time the actor and director worked together was 2008’s "Valkyrie," and McQuarrie has directed Cruise in the last three "Mission: Impossible" films, as well as produced "Top Gun: Maverick." Simon Pegg, who joined the "Mission: Impossible" franchise in 2006’s "Mission: Impossible III," agreed that the stories surrounding Cruise are overblown.

Jordan Moreau Tom Cruise is still preparing to boldly go where no actor has gone before. He and his “Edge of Tomorrow” director Doug Liman are set to film a movie in space and make Cruise the first civilian to perform a spacewalk. Universal is backing the film, which has a budget of around $200 million. When asked about his space-set movie at the “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” premiere in New York on Monday, Cruise said he didn’t have a production start date set, but, “We’ve been working on it diligently and we’ll see where we go.” Of course, Cruise still needs to finish making “Dead Reckoning Part Two,” the potential finale of his “Mission: Impossible” series, before he can plot his next movie. Writer and director Christopher McQuarrie, who’s overseeing both “Dead Reckoning” movies, said he and Cruise are getting right back to work on “Part Two” as soon as the “Part One” press tour ends.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning is the first entry in the blockbuster franchise to span two parts.Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, the first part follows Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his band of operatives as they chase down a key to deactivate a sentient AI device known as the “Entity”.Alongside returning cast members Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson and Vanessa Kirby, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One adds Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales and Pom Klementieff to the franchise.Both parts of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning were shot back-to-back, with McQuarrie writing and directing both installments.The follow-up is scheduled to be released in cinemas on June 28, 2024. This is less than a year after the first part, which came out on July 10, 2023 in the UK.Along with serving as a direct sequel, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two will feature a bunch of new cast additions, including Nick Offerman, Hannah Waddingham, Holt McCallany and Janet McTeer.Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, McQuarrie implied there’s a plan in place for a ninth installment following Part Two.

Madison LeCroy scored an invite to the Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One premiere — and she snagged a selfie with Ethan Hunt himself.

Vanessa Kirby handled a wardrobe malfunction like a pro at the Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One premiere in New York City on Monday, July 10. 

Tom Cruise makes epic blockbuster films, but the 61-year-old actor and producer doesn’t consider himself above his co-stars and film crew members.

How does it feel to be on the receiving end of completely wild, baseless dating rumors? Hayley Atwell did NOT like it!

Naman Ramachandran Disney releases “Elemental” and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” were locked in a near dead heat at the U.K. and Ireland box office, with the animated elements edging out the veteran archaeologist. “Elemental” debuted with £3.049 million ($3.876 million), according to numbers from Comscore. In its second weekend, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” whipped up £3.046 million ($3.873 million) for a close second and now has a total of £13.1 million. If looking at weekend numbers alone, Harrison Ford’s last adventure as the man in the hat won the race as the “Elemental” numbers include “limited secret sneak previews from across the market,” according to Disney.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One co-star Tom Cruise have affected her.The actress, who is engaged to music producer, director and actor Ned ‘Wolfgang’ Kelly, in new interviews dismissed claims that she and Cruise were ever an item – and that such “grubby” speculation was “invasive”.She told The Telegraph that the rumours about Cruise were just that. “It’s tabloid journalism.

“Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” has arrived ahead of its Wednesday premiere.Unlike the official trailer for the action flick, this latest promotional trailer solely highlights the movie’s action. As the video cuts between Tom Cruise performing seemingly impossible stunts like running on an exploding train and motorcycling off the edge of a cliff, snippets of reviews play appear onscreen. The new teaser doesn’t appear to offer any new footage that hasn’t appeared in the first trailer, but it does emphasize Cruise’s stunts.Set to debut later this week, the movie is averaging a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes.