‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One’ Is a Monster Movie, Followed Up by Another “Outrageous” Movie Next Year; New Details on Hayley Atwell’s Character Revealed
(L-R) Hayley Atwell as Grace and Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in Paramount Pictures’ Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part one. Image via Empire Magazine.
The upcoming Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is looking to be an adventure like no other. Tom Cruise reprises his role as Ethan Hunt five years after the release of the last film, Fallout, and three years after production began on the new one. If there has been a film marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s been this one. Now, the cast and crew are trying for the film to be released as smoothly as possible.
Empire Magazine had the chance to talk to co-writer and director Chris McQuarrie for their new issue, and revealed a brand-new still image from the production (see above). The picture features Tom Cruise next to Hayley Atwell, who joins the franchise after several attempts over the years on Cruise and McQuarrie’s behalf. But this is no ordinary character she’s playing, as the director explained:
“Hayley’s character didn’t have a name for a long, long time. She has her own objective, and she more or less becomes ensnared in this movie. What you have here is a character who absolutely does not belong in a Mission: Impossible movie, and she’s doing everything she can to get out of it.”
Details are being kept close to the chest on Atwell’s character, who is one of the few the director has played particularly coy about opening up on. To Empire, he revealed she is called Grace, and is “an agent of chaos”; she has a pivotal chase scene in the middle of the film through the streets of Rome that, much like the rest of the film, was a nightmare to shoot.
Tom Cruise and Esai Morales engage in hand-to-hand combat on top of a moving train in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. Photo via Empire Magazine
But we know from the title that Part One is only the beginning. The team is currently knee-deep into production on Dead Reckoning Part Two, due out next year, and Empire also pushed the director on that film. Cameras started to roll for Part Two in South Africa and the Arctic, likely to shoot a submarine sequence that will also appear in Part One (the production at some point reworked the third act of Part One to also include the submarine that was once only supposed to be in the sequel). McQuarrie described both films as monsters, teasing that the scope of the sequel will be as large as, if not larger than the first one:
“Tom and I are always trying to get the big shit out of the way first. South Africa was intense. The aerial sequence is… It’s just outrageous. The thing to remember as you’re watching this monster [aka. Part One] is that another monster waits behind it.”
Tom Cruise in ‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One’. Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
As Tom Cruise himself teased, there is always a bigger stunt that is waiting to be attempted:
“[At every premiere, I whisper to him:] We can do better. He knows it’s true. Since I was a young actor, people go, ‘Well, what do you do next?’ There’s always another mountain to climb. Always.”
Added McQuarrie:
“Behind each tsunami is another tsunami. It’s unrelenting. We live in a state of 24-hour tsunami awareness. That’s just what we do.”
Cruise’s name was also recently in the news as it was reported by Matt Belloni on Puck News that Cruise was pressing to get as many IMAX screens as possible for as long as possible to show Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. In particular, he wanted theaters to bow out of a deal that they had signed with Universal and that would grant Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer exclusivity to all IMAX screens in North America for the first three weeks of release. Oppenheimer opens in theatesr on July 21, 9 days after Dead Reckoning Part One.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
