Mission: Impossible 7 Star Hayley Atwell Reveals New Details About Her Character

After leaving her mark on the Marvel Cinematic Universe with her ultra-beloved turn as Peggy Carter, actress Hayley Atwell is moving on to tackle another one of Hollywood’s biggest franchises. The former Agent Carter star landed a role in the upcoming seventh and eighth installments of the Mission: Impossible franchise, the first of which arrives in theaters next fall. The identity of Atwell’s character remains a mystery, as do many of the other new franchise additions, but Atwell and director Christopher McQuarrie are starting to pull back the curtain in regards to her on-screen role.

During a recent episode of Light the Fuse, a Mission: Impossible podcast, Atwell and McQuarrie joined the hosts to talk about their work on the franchise. They couldn’t say much about Atwell’s character, but did offer a little insight into her motivations in the next film.

“There’s ambiguity…the interesting thing we’re exploring is her resistance to a situation she finds herself in,” Atwell said. “How she starts off, where she becomes. The journey of what she comes into and what is asked of her and potentially where she ends up.”

McQuarrie went on to explain a little more about Atwell’s role, saying that they had to ensure she was a completely different character from those being played by Michelle Monaghan and Rebecca Ferguson.

“For Hayley to exist in a franchise where other women had come and made statements, we said ‘well it can’t be like that.’ We don’t want Hayley to be a repeat of any character that’s come before,” he said. “What’s left? What’s unique and what’s new? We wrote a scene about what we imagined the spark of that character to be, and that’s what Hayley came in and read. What we discovered there is this energy that Hayley had, specifically an energy with Tom. It’s not a vibe, it’s literally a vibration. You felt it and you were like, ‘I don’t know what to make of this person.’”

Tom Cruise, Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, and Vanessa Kirby will all be reprising their roles for Mission: Impossible 7, which arrives in theaters on November 19, 2021. Mission: Impossible 8 arrives one year later, on Novmber 4, 2022.