https://videos.metro.co.uk/video/met/2023/06/21/7455950011666940894/480x270_MP4_7455950011666940894.mp
Simon Pegg and Rebecca Ferguson of Mission: Impossible confess that the unconventional, essentially script-free process used in the Tom Cruise blockbuster films can leave them feeling ‘constantly stressed out,’ but they wouldn’t alter anything.
Both are back for the seventh and most recent installment of the series, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, which also serves as the gang’s penultimate mission.
Ferguson, 39, has played Isla Faust in the series for the previous two films, beginning with Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation in 2015, while Pegg, 53, has played technician-turned-field-agent Benji Dunn since 2006’s Mission: Impossible III.
‘I often compare it as giving birth,’ Ferguson says of returning to the franchise, knowing the stakes in terms of pulse-pounding action and jaw-dropping stunts are continually being increased between films. It’s painful, difficult, and exciting. You say to yourself, “I’ll probably never do this again.”
‘When it’s done, you forget – and then you’re eager to do it again!’
Pegg is in agreement, praising his colleague for an ‘amazing’ analogy, to which she quips: ‘Thank you. I have 15 children! But I think, jokes aside – that is for me – I love it. It is addictive.’
Both have already ‘done it again,’ so to speak, having completed a significant portion of the Dead Reckoning Part Two production before it was interrupted in June owing to the ongoing Hollywood writers’ strike.
‘Any chance I get to hang out with this one, I’m delighted – and we always know it’s going to be a challenge, we know we’re going to travel, we know we’re going to be up against time. But like, Rebecca says, it’s always worth it,’ Hot Fuzz star Pegg adds.
The incredible action featured in the trailer for the next Mission: Impossible film, which sees famed stunt addict Cruise go over the brink of a cliff on a motorbike, unfurling a parachute on his way down, has already made headlines.
During the movie’s finale, there’s also an exciting sequence set on a train, and these are the scenarios and set pieces that the movies are hung on, with the express intention of shocking viewers.
As a result, the performers have a more fluid method of working with a ‘dossier’ over a fully-written screenplay in preparation – and sometimes right up until a scene is shot.
‘We don’t get a document to read, start to finish, because this is something that we – a dossier, as they say in spy terms – we kind of, I say we make it up as we go along, McQ [writer-director Christopher McQuarrie] has it all in his head.’
‘He’s a brilliant writer, he’s a problem solver on a genius level, and so what he likes to do is get all the set pieces rigorously planned,’ Pegg explains.
‘And then all the connective tissue that joins that, the reasons for things happening, he kind of figures out with Tom as we go – so we’ll get pages the day of the shoot, or hours before, and so it’s really a kind of process of just constantly being stressed out!’
Ferguson chimes in that they’re also in a state of always ‘being prepared as who we are and then just going with it’.
She continues: ‘But with that said, it’s not a moment where Tom knows more. It’s so equal, we all laugh at how ridiculous it is.’
‘We’ve done scenes sometimes where it’s been decided what’s going to happen so late that we’ve literally been learning it just before, so we’re coming to it so fresh, but the way we work we get the chance to do it over and over again, [but] it’s a high stress [situation],’ Pegg shares.
However, the Dune and Greatest Showman actor believes she has a harder time remembering lines on the go than Pegg.
‘I have cue cards – he learns them within a second and he has monologues, I’m not kidding! I have one line.
‘Tom and I, we fight over where we put our cue cards sometimes. This one is just like, autopilot.’
They’ve been part of Ethan Hunt’s top-secret Impossible Mission Force (IMF) squad for several years now, with original star Ving Rhames as hacker Luther Stickell – the only actor other than Cruise to have starred in every Mission: Impossible film.
Have they evolved a form of shorthand through time?
‘We just speak in abbreviations really,’ says Ferguson.
‘Yes, when it’s the four of us, it usually gets silly,’ adds Pegg, to which Ferguson responds: ‘Super silly, especially when he’s [Pegg] around!’
The actress also recalls one of her first interactions with the franchise, when she met Cruise, Pegg, Rhames, and other key creatives.
‘I remember the first day I had a meeting with them, and someone said, “We have the star, we have this person, we have this [person]…” They were kind of telling me who everyone was in the gang, and he went: “So who are you?” And I thought, “Oh, I have to bring my game!”’
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One hits UK cinemas on Monday, July 10.
Source My Celebrity Life.
