Usually, actors have little to no say about their characters in a show or movie. In Mission: Impossible, Hayley Atwell revealed that when signing on for Dead Reckoning, director Christopher McQuarrie and leading star Tom Cruise had no ideas for a character. They wanted to work with her to build up what audiences see as Grace, a new ally to Ethan Hunt and his crew of spies.
Hayley Atwell on Creating a Mission: Impossible Character for Dead Reckoning
Hayley Atwell came into a screen test for the seventh installment of Mission: Impossible. Normally, she would act through a part to see if McQuarrie wanted her to join the cast. In an interview with IndieWire, she revealed that she was told they “didn’t have a character in mind. We find the actor we want to work with, and then we create the character with them.” That opportunity from people “of their caliber” meant that they gave “agency back to the artist.” Through this unconventional screen test, she could experiment from the start of the process, well before filming began.
By having that freedom, the Marvel star started thinking about Grace and her story. She described the character as a “lone wolf” who must deal with her inability to “trust other human beings, and how isolating that is as an existence” and “how she learns through an art to trust.”
We have seen plenty of powerful women grace the big screen, especially in Mission: Impossible films, from Hayley Atwell to Rebecca Ferguson. The star had ideas to set herself apart, going beyond “the femme fatale, the ice queen, the victim.”
“I just didn’t know, obviously, the details of it, or where that would fit within the plot, or if I could elevate her from being more than one thing, so she wasn’t just the femme fatale, the ice queen, the victim. That she could be full of contradictory qualities, and that you could have moments of levity, vulnerability, self-assurance, self-doubt, fear, and panic, as well as courage of having a go anyway.”
Hayley Atwell is joining newcomers and veterans for the latest Mission: Impossible. Among new arrivals, we will see Pom Klementieff (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3), Esai Morales (Ozark), Shea Whigham (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse), and Cary Elwes (Stranger Things). They join Cruise, Ferguson, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, and Vanessa Kirby. The film is now out in theaters.
