[Editor’s note: This interview was recorded prior to the SAG strike.]It can’t be easy joining a franchise in its seventh installment and holding your own opposite an industry juggernaut like Tom Cruise, but Hayley Atwell still winds up being a major standout in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.

The new M:I film introduces Atwell’s Grace, or rather “Grace,” a thief who finds herself in the middle of Ethan’s (Cruise) mission to track down both halves of a key needed to control a self-aware artificial intelligence program called The Entity. That mission lands Grace in a Fiat 500 with a mind of its own, on a train plummeting into a ravine, and in a number of other mighty dangerous situations.
Not only is Atwell an ace in the stunt department, but she also finds great success in bringing a hugely charming, well-layer, and complex character to screen in the midst of all of this mind-blowing action. It’s a performance feat that makes Grace feel real and contributes to keeping Dead Reckoning Part One somewhat grounded, which ups the suspense of the film tenfold.
With Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One now playing in theaters, Atwell took the time to join me for an episode of Collider Ladies Night. We discussed formative experiences when first beginning her journey as an actor, including an extremely valuable two-week internship with a casting director, her take on making network television after working on Agent Carter, and then jumped into some Mission: Impossible specifics.

Image via Paramount Pictures

Clearly I think writer-director Christopher McQuarrie and the team wound up with a stellar new M:I character in Grace, but it’s not because that’s precisely how she was scripted from day one. Instead, McQuarrie isolated a quality of Atwell’s work he loved, and then they developed the character together from there. Atwell began:
“Chris McQuarrie had seen me in the play The Pride at Trafalgar Studios in London 10 years ago, and I met him afterward and he said there was a moment in the play that he went, ‘That thing that she does, that she can access, I want it. I want it in a movie, I just don’t know in what capacity.’ He said that to me quite early on when I got the role. He was like, ‘We’ve been trying to find this moment for six years now.’ It’s now been obviously 10 years because the film took four years to make. There’s a moment of vulnerability for the character in the play that’s really held in this very silent moment, and it’s really beautiful, and [director] Jamie Lloyd would create this space where he’d go, ‘Every night dare yourself to hold on to that emotion without saying anything, and let the audience, in that silence, just have that experience of what that character’s internal world is.’ So I’d sort of bravely, every night, try and extend that pause, but not so much that it became indulgent or [get] people like, ‘Come on.’ And it was a timing that I could find throughout the run [that] created the biggest impact.”
That drive to have an audience experience Grace’s internal world led inspired Atwell to embrace and flesh out a key component of the character that would then allow her to pair the exhilarating action scenes with emotional complexity. It was Grace’s vulnerability. Atwell continued:
“So for McQ, it was quite into filming where my character Grace has quite a vulnerable moment and I think instinctively I started becoming much more engaged with the cost of what Grace had been through, but also the cost of what it is to be hypervigilant and hyper, hyper independent in the world. And I found her wound, and what that wound is is, if we are, as human beings, our survival is dependent on connection and attachment to our primary caregivers then to our family, our friends, our society, our tribe, then the person who is running away from any possibility of connection because they don’t trust other human beings is coming from a place of survival that’d be very lonely and quite painful to exist in. And so, for me, discovering that Grace is in a conflict [with] the thing that she and any human being wants the most in the world, which is friendship and kinship, is the thing that she’s also most scared of, therefore won’t allow herself to feel it or trust. It creates this emotional impact. And that, to me, was like, ‘Oh, that’s the heart of her.’ And then I was able to sort of work backwards and all the fun stuff and all the levity and the action stuff was sort of on the surface, but then underneath there was something more psychologically astute at play going on.”

Image via Paramount

Veering back towards stunts, Atwell took a moment to highlight what it took to pull off two of the film’s most impressive action set pieces, trying to survive a train tumbling into a ravine and driving a car speeding through the streets of Rome while handcuffed to Tom Cruise.
One thing that worked in Atwell’s favor? Drifting cars came quite naturally to her. She explained:
“[Stunt Coordinator] Wade Eastwood is always looking to see where my natural abilities lay. Like Pom Klementieff is amazing at high, high kicks and she had been studying martial arts for many, many years so it became a very specific stylized fighting skill she was brilliant at. For me, drifting came really quickly and Wade was like, ‘We’re gonna use this.’ So anything that I was getting to a high level of competency in they were like, ‘Okay, we’ll use that in the movie.’”
Atwell continued by recalling a moment when she received an unexpected visitor in a helicopter while practicing her drifting. It was Tom Cruise, of course.
“I had just worked out the knack of drifting and Tom came out of nowhere in a helicopter and flew down unexpected and I looked at the mirror and Wade was like, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah. He’s just coming to say hi. Play with him. He’ll follow you and you [drive[ the car,’ and I’m going, ‘Oh, my god!’ And he’s piloting the helicopter going like, ‘Hi! How you doing?’ I’m like, ‘I’m fine. This is intense.’ But I felt so safe doing it. And I think what working with those guys taught me is that you can perform recklessness, but be very in control of what you’re doing, and I would need that so by the time that we got to Rome where these obstacles have actually, you know, people around, older buildings, there’s higher stakes, these are real stunts, that we can do it, we can have a freedom to our performance, we could try lots of different things because we have the foundation of that discipline down.”

Image via Paramount

While Atwell did have the necessary training and support to execute complex stunt scenes, her own genuine fear did creep in at one particular moment and ultimately, that improvised moment serves the character and scene quite well.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’s train sequence is extensive with quite a few wildly impressive scenes within it, but the favorite of the bunch for me is the one with Ethan and Grace hanging on for dear life as the train slips off the tracks and falls over the ravine. Here’s what Atwell said when asked for the single moment within that scene that proved most challenging:
“Without giving too much spoilers away, she’s hanging, she’s in the vertical train and it’s going over a ravine and the piano is about to fall, and he’s going, ‘Jump.’ And this follows a moment where he’s already jumped across and he’s going, ‘Jump.’ You can see she’s got adrenal fatigue, she knows that if she doesn’t, she’s gonna die, but she’s also gonna take a risk by jumping because she might not make it. And it follows a moment, which was improvised and Tom really loved it and kept on asking me to do it again and again, when he goes, ‘Do you trust me?’ The first time I did it, I just went, [uncertain] ‘Yeah?’ And that was all real, you know? I felt like I trusted him, but I didn’t know if Grace would in this moment. It was so much. And then take after take having to jump across that train carriage, and it’s big. It’s a huge cylinder. It’s this vessel, hollow vessel, and I have to jump and he catches me with one arm and holds my body weight as a piano goes rushing past us. It was timed safely, so I was given a cue when my platform I was on starts to break, and it would always scare me because that would go and I’d kind of lose my footing and then I’d have to jump, and I’d have no choice. I couldn’t decide in my own time when to do it. You go and you don’t think about it, and that would always take my breath away.”
Eager to hear even more from Atwell on the making of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One and Grace’s future in the franchise? You can find just that in her main Collider Ladies Night episode at the top of this article, or you can listen to the interview uncut in podcast form below: