‘Mission: Impossible 7’ Star Hayley Atwell Talks Hanging Off a Train With Tom Cruise and Female Representation in Action Movies
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It’s 10 a.m. in Sydney, where Hayley Atwell is preparing to walk the red carpet as the “Mission: Impossible” crew’s newest member, joining producer and star Tom Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie’s ensemble of battle-hardened actors.
“This is a pure cinematic experience. It’s unadulterated entertainment, and of a huge scale,” Atwell says to Variety about “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” which finally hit theaters on July 12 following a two-year delay caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Flashy events like the Australia premiere (which featured a fireworks spectacle in honor of Cruise’s 61st birthday on July 3) mark the end of a four-year odyssey that pushed Atwell’s limits physically — leaving her hanging inside a train car that’s gone from horizontal to vertical, gripping anything nailed to the floor/wall/ceiling lest she fall to her death (or at least the safety rigging below) — and saw her creating a cunning character within the “M:I” universe.
“I’m aware that this is entertainment,” Atwell adds. “But I’m also aware that my responsibility as an actor is to contribute in my own small way to the kind of characters I want to see represented.”
Atwell plays Grace, a professional thief who becomes embroiled in Ethan Hunt’s (Cruise) latest impossible mission — tracking down a rogue artificial intelligence system. Among its various plotlines, “Dead Reckoning Part One” chronicles Grace’s origins, explaining how the pickpocket becomes an integral part of the narrative.
She’s seen the movie four times, the first at a screening for the cast and crew, with her mother as her plus one (and Cruise watching her mum instead of the screen to gauge her enjoyment.) So, what did mum make of the movie?
“She’s very vocal and effusive when it comes to the big action sequences. She’s like, ‘Oh my God, why didn’t you tell me you’re doing that?’” says Atwell, who quipped: “Because you would have been really nervous for me.”
The death-defying stunt work aside, Atwell’s mother also shared a poignant takeaway. “She recognizes the grounding that I’ve done with Grace, of giving her emotional depth,” Atwell shares. “She could see that I was able to hold my own with my own experience of being in this industry and bringing truth to the role.”
The British American actor joins the IMF from the MCU, where she played Margaret “Peggy” Carter for more than a decade. Over the course of six movies and the ABC series “Agent Carter,” Peggy rose through the ranks to lead the government agency S.H.I.E.L.D. — challenging misogyny in the workplace with the same verve she nabbed supervillains. Plus, Peggy represents one half of the multiverse’s most enduring romance, as the first love of Steve Rogers a.k.a. Captain America (Chris Evans).
There’s really no comparison between Marvel and “Mission,” Atwell says. It’s really apples and oranges — or more specifically akin to performing Kenneth Lonergan’s adaptation of “Howards End” versus starring in Henrik Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm” on the West End.
“They’re just so distinctively themselves — a different group of filmmakers, different tastes, different character, different worlds,” she explains. “They just happen to be things that have become global phenomena.”
Yet there’s a bridge that carries Atwell from one franchise to the other: the way she personified both women.
“What I tried to do with Peggy — and I think it’s the reason I got the part in ‘Mission’ — I didn’t play her like I was in a superhero film. And with Grace, I’m not playing her like I’m in an action film,” Atwell notes. “Peggy taught me that I can be distinctively grounded in a character that’s going to stand out, rather than get consumed by the machine of something.”
A “Mission” movie is not your typical Hollywood machine. For starters, there’s no set script, so Atwell developed Grace from the ground up alongside Cruise and McQuarrie. “I didn’t feel like I was having to fit into a character that they’d created,” she explains, “because they hadn’t actually created one.”
Each scene offered an opportunity to add nuance and subvert any action movie stereotypes about “strong” women. “I thought, well, it’s an opportunity here to do many different takes” on the character, Atwell says. “I didn’t want her to seem that she was just trying to look cool, or femme fatale, or a sex object.”
She sees Grace’s motivation as one driven by some deep wound that’s caused the character to be distrustful of others and retreat from society. “Something’s got to have happened to her to interrupt the very deep human need that we all have to belong — whether it’s to our family, our social group, or some sort of tribe, or workforce that gives us a sense of identity,” she reasons, pinpointing why Grace can be “unpredictable, untrustworthy and inconsistent.”
In a recent interview with The Telegraph, Atwell revealed that at age 13 she wrote letters to her 40-year-old self — Atwell is 41 — questioning what her life would be like. She shared that teenage Hayley would’ve been thrilled to learn she’d booked a “M:I” movie. But the teen would’ve had a big question: “Were you able to push the conversation forward about female representation in a franchise of this size?’”
The answer to that query is “Yes,” Atwell tells Variety, explaining that the mission she undertook with Grace was “to allow her and give her the platform to be more than one thing.”
“Dead Reckoning” features an abundance of female characters: Rebecca Ferguson plays Ilsa Faust, a former MI6 agent turned IMF ally; Vanessa Kirby as black-market arms dealer Alanna Mitsopolis, a.k.a the White Widow; and fellow franchise-newcomer Pom Klementieff as the sociopathic assassin Paris.
“All the characters are so distinctive, and that’s what’s great,” Atwell says. “They’re never all one thing — they all come in with their own agendas and their own ideas about who they are and what they want to be and what they want to do to affect people in the scene. Any one of them could have a spin-off and collectively, too.”
It’s striking to see all four share the screen in one particularly tense scene — further demonstrating that their roles are additive, not competitive.
“Women in this franchise aren’t pitted against each other,” Atwell notes, adding that, “It’s a false assumption that that’s how it has to be, and probably more to do with a comment on the culture of celebrity that does seem to pit women against each other in a ‘Who wore it best?’ situation. But that mindset is not a creative act.”
On the topic of female representation, Atwell often recalls a line from art critic John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing”: “Men act, and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Those words, Atwell says, have been true to her experience as an actor, and what she believes to be true for many women in the public eye. She wanted “Mission” to be different.
“I don’t want to feel that Grace is aware that she’s being looked at. I want to see what Grace is looking at,” Atwell says. “She’s in a world that’s over her head, but she’s in a hypervigilant state of trying to work out how to navigate it, and how to survive through it.”
Thus, Grace employs her sense of humor and other tactics like flirtation to get where she needs to go. “She can duck, dive and disappear, or she can call Ethan Hunt a ‘pervert’ publicly in order to escape him,” Atwell says, giggling at the character’s cheekiness in one key moment.
And since physical prowess is a prerequisite for the franchise, Atwell also underwent five months of stunt training, so she was ready to improvise whenever a scene required it. She experimented with different disciplines of mixed martial arts, worked on sleight of hand tricks and pickpocketing (the latter which she’s “terrible” at because she’s “an awful liar”) and learned to drift in a race car.
One day, while training, stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood handed her two knives to hold while practicing a trapping and grappling sequence. Turns out, Atwell could do her moves faster with the addition of the prop weapons.
“I think it comes from theater – I love working with props on a stage because you can convey so much and they’re an extension of your character,” she says, letting her inner theater nerd geek out. “The way that you stir a cup of tea can tell how much you hate someone you’re talking to, or that you’re trying to seduce them.”
Training for a “M:I” movie is like a boot camp, but it’s not about the aesthetics. It’s about building a different kind of strength and Hayley has the bruises to prove it. “At the time that I came to set, my body was fit for purpose,” Atwell says.
Part of that purpose was developing the shorthand between herself and Cruise so that Grace and Ethan could create an “elegant physicality” when handcuffed together. The duo also brushed up on their classic cinema, watching 70s heist movies like “Paper Moon” and “The Sting,” as well as “The Thomas Crown Affair,” “To Catch a Thief” and “Bringing Up Baby” to build a library of references to pull from tonally.
“When they’re sort of do-si-doing around the car with each other, there is this sense that these two people who are exasperated by each other share an origin story and are naturally working together whether they realize it or not,” Atwell explains.
During the car chase scene, Atwell was not only tasked with drifting the car while handcuffed to Cruise, but also taking performance notes from McQuarrie about adjusting Grace’s reaction to the circumstances. Add onto that the reality of filming with a swarm of fans and paparazzi watching the production speed through the streets. Here, her theater training again paid dividends.
“Live performance is a huge tool for a movie like ‘Mission,’ because when the curtain goes up, you can’t get a retake, and the audience are going to be there to watch if you fall flat on your face, or your downward inflections bore the audience to tears,” she explains. “You get feedback by picking up the atmosphere that that you’re helping to create in that auditorium.”
Atwell compares the atmosphere on set to becoming the eye of the storm, with Cruise leading the charge by maintaining his composure at its absolute center and her following suit. “You’re very calm in the midst of all this noise and stimulation and equipment and changes and locations, and COVID and paparazzi, and journalists and all that stuff,” she says.
The Rome chase takes place in two vehicles — a BMW M5 and a Fiat 500, affectionately nicknamed “Trixie,” for the way the tiny automobile whipped through the Italian streets and accidentally bamboozled Cruise.
“She had sort of a character of herself, which added so much kind of levity to it,” Atwell says of the automobile. “When you see Ethan finally being able to turn it on, and then immediately crash the car — that was real. That hadn’t been intended, and then we used it.”
Embracing those kinds of spontaneous moments are what made production fun. “The plot tends to be a metaphor for the making of a ‘Mission: Impossible’ film,” she explains. “McQ and Tom just go, ‘OK, well, this is what we’ve got today, so let’s actually find a way to use it for the movie.’”
And the idea of borrowing from reality works both ways. You see, when you’re so deeply immersed in a character for the length of time a “M:I” movie takes to make, it stands to reason that some of the skills will transfer. In Atwell’s case, it’s the driving, and now, her fiancé, music producer Ned “Wolfgang” Kelly really doesn’t like riding in the car with her.
“He’s like, ‘Please slow down. It’s quite erratic,’” Atwell says, laughing loudly at a memory of her panicked passenger’s reminder that she’s not in an action film. It’s just that the feeling of your adrenaline rising when you’re behind the wheel can be a little addictive. “It does sort of rub off on you,” she adds. “I have to rein it in a little bit and go, ‘I’m just going to the shop.’”
The training also paid off when Atwell returned to Marvel in 2022’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” for an action-packed cameo as Captain Carter. “Because I was so fit at that point, and I’d had such an education about how to move anatomically correctly and making sure that I was safe to do it, I wanted to do all the fighting,” she says. “I wanted it to go on much longer than it did.”
With “Mission,” her “scariest” stunt was the train sequence; it took nearly a year to complete because each car had to be built and filmed separately, with Atwell and Cruise shooting and re-shooting portions of the sequence to find the right tone.
“I’d see on the call sheet a year later that we’re going to spend the afternoon on that vertical train carriage again and be like, ‘Oh God, no, I’m so tired from that,’” she says. “So when you see Ethan going, ‘Do you trust me?’ and Grace just shakes her head — that’s me going, ‘Not anymore. I don’t want to do this anymore. It’s really scary.’ They loved it. They were like, ‘That’s going in.’”
Atwell notes that Cruise, too, gets a case of the nerves when risking his life for stunts. “Tom says it’s not that he doesn’t get nervous and scared, but that fear is OK for him. He accepts the feeling,” she says. “They don’t stop him from doing what he wants or needs to do.”
As for Atwell’s next mission — that’s territory unknown. “One thing at a time,” she says with a bright laugh, noting that “Dead Reckoning Part Two” is barely two-thirds through its shoot. “Jet lag is telling me the thing I want next is a little nap.”
Jordan Moreau contributed to this report.
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