Tom Cruise and Hayley Atwell trade off driving during a white-knuckle car chase scene in the new “Mission: Impossible,” though for the record, neither is a big fan of calling shotgun.
In “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” (in theaters Wednesday), superspy Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and skilled criminal Grace (Atwell) create vehicular havoc through Rome, and it was a thrilling aspect of Atwell’s high-profile introduction to the popular action franchise, no matter who was behind the wheel.
“Sitting in the passenger seat was certainly the easiest of the two, but driving was probably the most fulfilling because of how challenging I found it,” Atwell says. She recalls one stressful day being in the saddle with three cameras impairing her view and speeding by the Wedding Cake monument, “so the stakes are pretty high in terms of not wanting to damage any buildings or people.”
“To not be able to see properly, drifting, being in Rome handcuffed to a man in a passenger seat where he doesn’t particularly like to be, while I’m trying to work out what he’s communicating to me was like firing on all cylinders and having to be super-awake,” says Atwell, who returns for the film’s “Part Two” in 2024.
The British actress, 41, discusses the creation of her “agent of chaos,” what she learned from Cruise and finding her TikTok groove.
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In the seventh and latest “Mission” outing, Grace is an enigmatic thief caught up in Ethan’s quest to shut down a rogue artificial intelligence that threatens the world. Atwell and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie teamed up to craft Grace’s “consistently inconsistent” character.
“She’s hypervigilant and just surviving and trying to work out where her exit is, how much danger she’s in, and how she can kind of disappear when she needs to,” says Atwell, who added her own “playfulness” to the role. And McQuarrie feels Grace is a compelling persona because the actress, “like Tom, is not afraid to look afraid.”
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When it came to those signature “Impossible” stunts, Cruise is “very cautious, very much the health-and-safety guy,” she says. “Every time we got into a car, he’d go, ‘Look, let’s say out loud all the dangerous spots we can see.’ ” But they also sought to hit “that sweet spot where we are adrenalized as we’re doing it.”
The one sequence that really rattled Atwell: when train cars on the Orient Express fall one by one off a cliff. Ethan and Grace have to carefully navigate dangling carriages, including a harrowing bit where Grace jumps across the car before a piano falls on her head. “I had to time it so that soon as it starts to collapse, that’s when I jump across,” Atwell says. “I never got used to that feeling where you’re going to lose footing, and you see it on my face.”
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The stage was key to Hayley Atwell finding her inner action hero
As secret agent (and Captain America’s true love) Peggy Carter, Atwell embraced brawls, gunfights and other derring-do in the Marvel TV series “Agent Carter” and multiple superhero movies. But her real action-hero mettle was forged during three years of training at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama. “From posture to core strength to knowing how to move and to run, that’s really important so that you can feel physically more present on stage,” Atwell says.
That discipline carried over to “Mission: Impossible” and crafting a character “who looks capable but (she’s) raw material,” Atwell says. “A lot of the training I did for ‘Mission’ was working out how to get her to be as dynamic as possible so I could try lots of different things on the day.”
She took a lesson from Tom Cruise: Be a good student (even on TikTok)
One nugget she kept from her work with Cruise was “Always be the student” – “which means that you end up never taking it for granted or think you’ve mastered something,” Atwell says. And there was a lot to learn with “Dead Reckoning,” from pickpocket skills to five months of drift training. “I’m probably quite an erratic driver. I feel very in control and I’m never like over the speed limit, but I know how to jolt a car and go fast very quickly,” Atwell says. “And I have friends and family going like, ‘We’re just going to the shops. Please don’t.’ ”
Now she’s a student of TikTok. She joined in June and has already created some choice posts, including one where she takes on a treadmill in high heels. “Where else can I rock these heels? What completely inappropriate setting?” Atwell quips. “I’m like, ’Can I do this? Is this cool goofball energy or are people going, what are you doing?’ The trick is just to have as much fun with it as possible and it seems to rub off on people. They can feel it.”