Mission: Impossible star Hayley Atwell reacts to Tom Cruise’s craziest stunt yet

It's an incredible sequence, and possibly the most dangerous stunt yet for Cruise to undertake – so you might be wondering how his co-stars reacted when they first found out what he had planned.

"At this point, it's like... of course he is," Hayley Atwell explained when quizzed by RadioTimes.com during an exclusive interview.

"Because he and [director Christopher] McQ[uarrie] are always trying to have a bigger ambition and a vision from what they've done before.

"So when they come up with it, they're so enthusiastic about the idea, and you know that they've got this meticulous training and preparation that's going to be involved in it, and they work with the experts that they can find."

She continued: "But at the same time, when you know it's happening in real time, I felt myself kind of texting the crew going, 'Is he okay? Did he make it through the day? How is he? Is he all right? Does he need any food? Is he sleeping okay?'"

"Are we working tomorrow?!" added Tarzan Davis.

The stunts weren't the only extreme part of shooting for The Final Reckoning, and one key chapter in the movie saw the cast filming in the Arctic – where the temperatures were extremely low.

But Atwell explained that this was an experience she largely enjoyed, even if it led to a couple of unusual encounters.

"I loved it," she said. "I'm terrible in heat. I lose my sense of humour. I want to curl up in a dark room, and I just, I'm just brain dead. I'm like a wasp at the end of summer. I'm just, 'Get me out of it.' So for me, the Arctic was heaven, because it was bright sunshine and bouncing off the light of the white snow and the cold was for me, very invigorating.

"And I remember the first time on set that I came and saw everyone, and everyone's trying to work out who everyone is, because you can only kind of see their eyes through goggles, so no bit of skin is exposed. And I saw McQ, and I could tell it was McQ, because all his facial hair had frozen, so he looked like a walrus!"

She added: "I could just see one, like, massive icicle, coming off his face. I was like, 'Wow, how long have you been out here?' He's like, 'Three and a half minutes!'

"I like icicles in my eyelashes at one point, it was wild. And then we had scenes that were interrupted by the presence of a polar bear to kind of stop, jump back on... get back to the icebreaker, and let the polar bear cross on set, so we could then come in and get the scene!"

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is released in UK cinemas on Wednesday 21st May 2025.

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