In the Mission: Impossible franchise, Hayley Atwell‘s Grace is an extremely talented pickpocket, so talented that in the latest installment The Final Reckoning, the fate of the entire world relies on her slight-of-hand. What’s perhaps surprising, however, is that Atwell herself became a real-life amateur pickpocket in the process.
“I did take it quite literally,” she tells Parade exclusively, “I have stolen several things from the set: a salt and pepper shaker, an ashtray, a watch, a necklace, some documents, a fossil, some fake glass.”
Tom Cruise‘s Mission: Impossible co-star didn’t stop on set either. “Last night over dinner, I stole Tom’s hot sauce that was made especially for him by the restaurant, because the other spices weren’t hot enough. They’d made him this special concoction that was in this beautiful glass bottle with a pipette, so at the end of the meal, I went, ‘Oh, I will have that.'”
The allure was less in Tom Cruise’s specially brewed hot sauce (“I tried it on the edge of my tongue,” Atwell recalls, “And I was like, ‘Okay, that’s enough. I’m done.’ It was pretty intense.”) but more in the thrill of using her newly found skills. “I’m quite, quite nifty at the old hand tricks,” she says.
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With the Mission: Impossible franchise being well-known for its practical effects, Atwell has learned a lot more than just how to nab a glass vial off a dinner table without anyone noticing.
“For the first five months, I was working with the stunt team on drifting in a car,” she remembers about the beginning of her training for Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning. “We spent a lot of time on the racetrack, learning how to drift. A lot of running, because I knew I’d be running with Tom and looking at the form of that. A lot of fight sequences, choreography that involved pickpocketing and slight of hand tricks. Working with knives and just creating a sense where my body was physically capable of doing things repetitively without strain, being really mobile.”
While Atwell starred in multiple Marvel movies and television shows including Agent Carter, she says that the level of physicality required for the Mission: Impossible films is completely different. “This is five years of my life and no CGI,” she says. “The main thing was getting myself to a place of physical readiness where I’m mobile, dynamic, resilient and have enough stamina to learn things quickly and to do them repetitively from different angles. A backflip off a bridge in Venice or moving backwards off a moving train in Dead Reckoning, working on a dog sled in the Arctic. It’s not just a physical stance, but it’s the real environments and locations that we found ourselves in, as opposed to being in a studio.”
When Mission: Impossible decided to set a scene in the arctic on a dogsled, the cast and crew headed to the northern recesses of Norway to film with actual dogs, a move many franchises would have certainly opted out of in favor of a studio and CGI.
“We were working with dog handlers,” Atwell remembers. “It was minus 40 degrees. We were living on an icebreaker ship. We played cards at night. What I loved about [the dogs] is as soon as they knew they were about to take off for a run, they’d get so animated and excited. I loved it. I found it really invigorating. That was a set where you’re stopping to let polar bears go by, and you’re going to set on a SkiDoo.”
While polar bears would occasionally wreak havoc on the filming schedule, one also got up close and personal with Atwell and co. at night on their ship. “We went upstairs on the deck, and we saw this polar bear that had stood on its hind legs and put its paws on the side of the ship,” she remembers. “We just watched it walk around the side of the ship before it lost interest and eventually walked off knowing it probably couldn’t get access to us, thank god.”
Related: We Ranked All Eight ‘Mission: Impossible’ Movies, Including ‘The Final Reckoning’
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While Atwell’s death-defying stunts are not quite on the same level as Tom Cruise’s, she admits she’s down for just about everything. When asked if she’d have taken on Cruise’s grand Final Reckoning stunt, hanging off the side of an airplane, she says, “At this point, yeah. I think Tom could have convinced me to do anything. He makes everything seem possible.”
In addition to one-of-a-kind stunts, the Mission: Impossible franchise is also unique in its scripting process, with a more build-as-you-go strategy than something that’s firmly set in stone. When director Christopher McQuarrie initially approached Atwell about joining the team (he’d been impressed by her work on stage years prior), she was brought in for not only a two-hour-long stunt audition, but also a creative jam session of sorts with Cruise.
“I came in for a screen test with Tom,” she remembers, “And McQ had written eight pages of dialogue for me to have the night before just to learn. I came in and I learned it, but [Tom and I] started working together to try the scene in various ways. We rewrote the scene, and we changed certain lines around. He said, ‘Okay, now perform it like you’re holding onto a secret. Now perform it like you’re totally innocent and you’re wide-eyed.’ They wanted to see my range, but they also were seeing whether or not I liked the process of changing things up and trying new things, and whether I was willing to adopt that process.”
Due to the real-time creation, Atwell’s Grace doesn’t come with a backstory. “It doesn’t matter what her past is, so much as whatever we’re creating in the present moment can then dictate decisions we want to make about her backstory,” Atwell says of the character.
More than that, however, Atwell doesn’t even know the plot of the movie when she’s filming it. She said she didn’t learn the full scope of The Final Reckoning until “I sat down to watch it last week in front of an audience in Japan.”
Even within her individual scenes, she can’t be sure of what’s happening. “There is an understanding that because I’m creating in real time with them, there’ll be different versions of it,” she says. “So I’ll play Grace in one way then I might try playing her in a different way. There’ll be scenes where she goes off in this direction, and scenes where she does something very different in the story. We’re always just looking at how I can expand the range of ideas so that there was a lot for them to play with in the edit when they want to put it all together.”
Related: Hayley Atwell Says Tom Cruise Inspired Her to Do All Her Own ‘Mission: Impossible’ Stunts Too
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While Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning was originally intended to be the grand finale of the franchise, the film’s ending isn’t quite as “final” as the title would imply. Atwell says whether or not this is the last M:I movie is up to the fans. “I think audiences have to watch it and make their minds up about what they think it is and what they think becomes of everyone,” she says. “For me, this is an accumulation of all the movies that have come up to this point, and there was a sense of closure and satisfaction about what things are tied up.”
When asked what she thought her character Grace would be up to post-Final Reckoning, Atwell responds, “I think she’s carrying on, traveling the world, picking people’s pockets and getting herself into all sorts of trouble.”
No doubt somewhere in the Mission: Impossible world, Grace is also pilfering designer hot sauce on the reg.
Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning is now playing in theaters.
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