Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning’s Hayley Atwell Didn’t Speak For 100 Days of Filming

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is finally landing in theaters next week, and it’s expected to be another action-packed installment to the Tom Cruise franchise. The movie is currently up on Rotten Tomatoes with a 99% critics score after 138 reviews. In addition to Cruise, the new film features many familiar faces from the franchise as well as some exciting newcomers. One such actor is Marvel Cinematic Universe star, Hayley Atwell. While Atwell is no stranger to action, making a Mission: Impossible film was different from what she’s used to. In fact, she recently told Total Film that she went three months without speaking on camera during the production. 

“I come from the theater and I talk a lot. I’m so used to language,” Atwell explained. “Language has always been the first tool that I learned from drama school and understanding the classics and plays. So, coming into a franchise like this and spending 100 days purely about physical behavior and gesture, I felt like ‘Am I expressing enough?’, because I’m so used to being vocal as my main thing.”

“What was clear was you’d look at playback and it just felt alive. The physical presence had come from the chemistry I’d found with Tom and the preparation I was doing with this incredible, world-class stunt team. So, you feel her energy and feel her emotion without her having to say anything. There is this sense that you’re part of this workshop or masterclass in pure cinematic experience and how they create it. That, to me, in between takes – that’s where I did all my talking and all my questions. For the camera, I found this new language that was just not having to be vocal.”

Hayley Atwell Breaks Down Mission: Impossible Car Chase:

In a conversation with ComicBook.com’s Brandon Davis, Atwell expressed her admiration for Tom Cruise and said that she felt like he went out of his way to be good to his co-stars. During the chat, she also talked about her big car chase in the film.

“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.”

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is being released in theaters on July 12th.