Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One almost featured a de-aged Julia Roberts.
The new action spy movie is the seventh film in the long-running franchise starring the long-running movie star Tom Cruise as IMF Agent Ethan Hunt. This film features a few flashbacks to a young Ethan before the events of the original Mission: Impossible movie in 1996. These scenes feature Ethan watching the villainous Gabriel (Esai Morales) kill his girlfriend portrayed by Mariela Garriga.
Director Christopher McQuarrie shared his thoughts on how he approached that sequence. “I said, ‘Ok, if I were doing this sequence, it would be Tom in, say, 1989. It would be Tony Scott’s Mission: Impossible. That’s who would have been directing the movie before Brian De Palma, you know, in that era,” McQuarrie said on the Empire podcast (via Variety). “We looked at Days of Thunder and we looked at the style of it, and we started thinking what would it look like if Tony Scott had shot this, and who would it have been? I looked back at who was the ingenue, who was the breakout star in 1989? And right around then was ‘Mystic Pizza.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God. Julia Roberts, a then-pre-‘Pretty Woman’ Julia Roberts, as this young woman.’”
McQuarrie continued, “The only way I could have seen doing the sequence justice [using de-aging] was to somehow convince Julia Roberts to come in and be this small role at the beginning of this story. And of course, as you’re conceptually going through it, you’re like, ‘Now all anybody’s going to be doing is thinking about the de-aging of Julia Roberts, and Esai, and Tom, and Henry Czerny.’”
The decision was ultimately made to tell the story with Ethan’s face in shadow, following him from behind. McQuarrie felt like this was the best choice to avoid having audiences get distracted from the story by the de-aged faces of recognizable actors like Cruise and Roberts. Other filmmakers have embraced the de-aged route, with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny featuring a 25-minute opening action sequence following a de-aged Harrison Ford as the hero.
“I got the bill for de-aging those people before their salaries were even factored into it,” McQuarrie told Empire. “And if you put two of them in a shot together, or three of them in a shot together, it would have been as expensive as the train by the time we were done.” He is referring to the film’s climactic action set piece where they built a train from scratch and destroyed it.
Are there Mission: Impossible 7 post-credits scenes?
No, there is no end-credits scene.
The cast includes many familiar faces such as Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, and Henry Czerny reprises his role from the original Mission: Impossible. New cast members include Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales, Shea Whigham, Pom Klementieff, and Cary Elwes.
“Ethan Hunt and the IMF team must track down a terrifying new weapon that threatens all of humanity if it falls into the wrong hands,” reads the official synopsis. “With control of the future and the fate of the world at stake, a deadly race around the globe begins. Confronted by a mysterious, all-powerful enemy, Ethan is forced to consider that nothing can matter more than the mission — not even the lives of those he cares about most.”
