Mission Accomplished

- Phoebe reilly

There’s a few things you need to do to keep up with Tom Cruise, and Annabelle Wallis was prepared for most of them. By the time she was cast in this month’s The Mummy—Universal Studios’ reboot of their classic monster property from the 1930s, and more recently the ‘90s—the 32-year-old actress was, like most of the planet, well-versed in the Cruise canon. She expected the inevitable running scene, a staple since The Firm. In fact, the former high school sprinter was ready to outpace her co-star. She wasn’t surprised by the elaborate underwater sequence, à la Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, either. This, too, was a cakewalk: Growing up in Portugal, outside Lisbon, Wallis was already a strong swimmer. But as for Cruise’s idea to shoot on an actual Novespace Zero-G Airbus in free fall, to re-create zero gravity—that she did not see coming.

“They call it the vomit comet,” says Wallis, delighting in my unease. We’re at a West Hollywood bakery, and she’s using her hands to demonstrate the aircraft’s vertical incline at 20,000 feet before arcing back toward earth. Cruise had been saving this experiment for his next Mission: Impossible outing, but decided it better suited