Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning’s Hayley Atwell Breaks Down Film’s Wild Car Chase

As with a lot of Tom Cruise’s movies, the upcoming Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning centers on a lot of chasing. Cruise chasing the bad guys, bad guys chasing Cruise, you get it. We spoke with a couple of his castmates about being part of an iconic Tom Cruise running scene, but another big sequence in Dead Reckoning centers on a car chase, in which Cruise and Agent Carter star Hayley Atwell find themselves in the car together. 

In a conversation with ComicBook.com’s Brandon Davis, Hayley Atwell expressed her admiration for Cruise, and said that she felt like he went out of his way to be good to his co-stars — that makes sense, we suppose, since at this point he basically lives at the Mission: Impossible franchise, and co-stars are his house guests.

“How did Tom Cruise manage to sit in the passenger seat first of all, handcuffed to someone else who was driving him, drifting him?” Atwell said. “That, to me, shows total dedication to his craft. [That’s] probably the hardest thing he’s ever done in Mission: Impossible. He was so generous, wanting to find moments for Grace that had real levity in the middle of the car chase sequence —  that had real comedy between them, that felt earned, that didn’t feel pushed, or didn’t feel like it was actually gonna take away from the stakes of it. Watching Tom and [Christopher McQuarrie] design this, this sequence and having me on a racetrack very early in the morning before the sun had come up with [stunt driver] Wade Eastwood in London, making sure that I was drifting competently and weaving in between cones, to make sure that I could obstacle courses, meant that by the time we got out to Rome, we knew what the shape of it was, and we knew that there was always gonna be time to ad lib.” 

Atwell added, “So there was one day where I’m drifting in front of the wedding cake monument in Rome, and there were three cameras attached to the windscreen. So I can’t really see where I’m going. Tom is in the passenger seat handcuffed to me. I’ve, my character’s blown all four doors off the car already and we’re improvising. So Tom will say something like, ‘slow down, slow down.’ And I’ve gotta work out whether Tom is saying to Hayley actually slow down, or whether he’s saying it as Ethan to Grace, or whether he wants me as Grace to say that to him. And I remember just at the end just going, this is a lot. But also I was having so much fun, because there’s so, you know, he really cares about the people he works with. He wants to make sure that they feel that they’re doing their best too.”

“No one in my life actually wants to get into a car with me now. They’re like, yeah, we’ll take the bus. We’re fine. We’ll see you there.”

Tom Cruise is back as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, which premieres in theaters on July 12th. It’s the beginning of the end for the action-packed franchise, as Cruise reteams with longtime collaborator and filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie for more death-defying and breathtaking stunts. Hunt and allies Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) attempt to track down a new weapon with the power to tear the world apart. Actors Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, and Esai Morales join the cast for the latest installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise, which is set to wrap up with Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two.