Since teaming up on Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, the creative brain between writer-director Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise has bolstered Ethan Hunt’s narrative and given the franchise a more authentic edge-of-your-seat quality. From scaling the world’s tallest building to now racing a motorcycle off the edge of a cliff, Cruise’s passion for wowing audiences extends to even his castmates. While discussing Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, our own Steve Weintraub spoke with co-star Simon Pegg about what it’s like to see a longtime friend performing potentially deadly stunts with each iteration.

Dead Reckoning reunites Pegg’s Benji Dunn with Hunt on a mission against a powerful weapon that poses a threat to all of humanity, one that Pegg calls the “perfect antagonist.” The seventh entry takes the Impossible Mission Force to beautiful locations all over the world and presents Cruise with plenty of new opportunities to push his limits, as well as those around him. During his interview, which you can watch in the video or read below, Pegg opens up about the experience of watching Cruise attempt these death-defying practical stunts on each set. He gives us a breakdown of the most nerve-wracking sequences he’s personally been there for and ranks each one by how anxiety-inducing they were.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One also stars Hayley Atwell, Rebecca Ferguson, Pom Klementieff, Shea Whigham, and Vanessa Kirby, most of whom Pegg tells us were present for the long minutes after Cruise went off the side of the cliff. Check out the full interview below to find out what McQuarrie’s “superpower” as a filmmaker is, why Pegg believes Dead Reckoning takes on the most timely threat, and when fans will see Cruise’s most insane stunt to date.

COLLIDER: I love this movie. This movie is another level. Obviously, you’ve seen it, but for me, it was like the fastest 2.5-hour movie I’ve seen in a long time.

SIMON PEGG: I agree. I’ve watched 90-minute films that have felt longer than this.

Oh, 100%. So you’ve been involved in the Mission franchise since Mission: Impossible 3. You have witnessed Tom do ridiculous stunts that have to have scared you as a friend. When you think from Mission 3 to this one, and you think about all the major set pieces he’s done, rank the Simon Pegg Nervousness on the stunts in terms of you sitting there watching or not wanting to watch the set pieces, and then how nervous you were in some sort of ranking system.

PEGG: The ones that I’ve been present for, like literally on the day, I’m there while it’s happening, I would say number one would be the cliff jump. Just because the gap that would occur between when he disappeared to the radio saying, “Good canopy,” which is when we know he deployed his parachute, that space was like an eternity. It would be silence. Everybody was up there—me, Pom, Tarzan, Haley, Esai, Shea—we’re all up there, and we’re just waiting for that “good canopy,” and we’d all just relax. It was genuinely terrifying.

The second one, I would say, is probably the airplane, hanging onto the airplane in Rogue Nation. I was there sort of on the ground in my Ghillie suit, kind of watching that happen. And that was just– I mean, there were more variables involved in that one than some of the other stunts that we’ve done. Although, actually, I might push that down to three because when we were doing Fallout, and he was hanging from the helicopter, Rebecca and I are on the ground watching, and no one told us that he was going to drop from the skids to the bundle. So for two seconds, we just thought, “Oh, Tom’s fallen.” And then it was like, “No, no, it’s part of the thing.” [Laughs] So that was super terrifying.

What else have I been there for? The Burj Khalifa, but I would put that last only because Tom clearly was having the time of his life. He was just Spider-Manning all over the front of that building with a big shit-eating grin on his face, like, “I’m having the time of my life.” And I remember peeking out the window however many miles we were up, and he was just, he was clearly very relaxed in that one.

He really is, all kidding aside, risking his life. You’re his friend; have you ever pulled him aside before stunts or just talked to him and been like, “Hey, just in case, I love you?” Or is it sort of an unwritten rule on set that no one says things like that?

PEGG: No, I think you’re right. I think that kind of thing– we all understand it. The thing about Tom is that he feels an obligation to the audience to kind of provide this kind of thrill. He understands the value of an authentic, physical stunt, you know, a practical stunt. So we all know, there’s always a quiet sense of industry on the set when we’re prepping. But when we were in New Zealand shooting Fallout, Rebecca and I were going home, and Thomas and Henry were staying behind to do the helicopter chase. When we said goodbye, there was a slight sense of like, “OKay, well, maybe see you in London…” [Laughs] It was hard not to kind of be a bit like– there were extra squeezes with the hugs. It was a bit like, “I don’t know,” but obviously it was all fine.

I had a long chat with McQ this morning, and he said that the biggest stunt that it’s ever been done is later this year.

PEGG: Yes.

Do you get to be involved in that stunt?

PEGG: Well, let’s see if I survive until the end of this installment, shall we?

[Laughs] Okay, I’ll leave that there. Tom and McQ work in an interesting way because he was telling me that the train sequence he always knew was going to be in the third act, but he didn’t understand how it was all going to go and that they reshot it multiple times. So what is it actually like making a movie like this where McQ might just say, “Yeah, that didn’t work we’re gonna redo this whole thing?”

PEGG: I always say, oddly, my description of McQ’s filmmaking style is like in Wallace and Gromit when Gromit’s laying the track in front of the train as it’s going. That’s kind of how we work. McQ just trusts himself, and we all trust him that he’s never going to run out of track, you know? You ask him a question about, “What happens in this?” Or, “Why are we here?” And he’ll say, “I don’t know yet.” And you have to trust that he is gonna figure it out because his skill, his superpower as a filmmaker and a writer, is to problem solve.

So you give him a broken script and he’ll fix it just like that. He’s kind of learned, he and Tom have learned to make films in such a way where they have the big beats very, very, studiously planned out, but the connective tissue, the stuff for the reasons for these things happening, they kind of grow as we go. It’s exhilarating. Frustrating sometimes, but they always come up with the goods.

Image via Paramount

You have to agree that it’s very few filmmakers who can do what they do in terms of not having it all figured out before they stand on set.

PEGG: None. I don’t think there’s anyone else that could do that. And Tom and McQ just have such a rhythm now; they’ve galvanized their relationship since McQ came on board Ghost Protocol as a writer, to now three films in as writer-director and star. They have a relationship which is symbiotic. It’s quite amazing.

When McQ first told you that AI was going to be the thing, it was many years ago and he couldn’t have known how much AI was going to be in the media with everyone talking about it when the movie was coming out. So is he Nostradamus? Talk a little bit about how it’s a great villain for the time.

PEGG: We’ve spoken about this because when McQ pitched the idea to me back in 2019, it felt to me, “Oh, this is so Mission: Impossible.” It’s futuristic, but it’s still very much in the kind of tech theme that Mission: Impossible has. It’s the perfect antagonist for this series. And as we’ve been making the film, this kind of debate, this subject has become very much at the forefront of kind of the cultural subconscious. It’s amazing how prescient this film feels. I think it’s intriguing.

We’ve always been scared of things that we feel might supplant us, whether it’s monsters or gods or aliens or robots. This is a particularly kind of topical idea because it’s something that feels more likely than any of those other things. And as we discuss it and talk about the ethics of it, this film, I think, feels like a timely warning about what could happen.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is in theaters July 12. Check out Collider’s interview with Tom Cruise at the premiere in Rome below.