The Ride OF HER LIFE

Starring in two of the year’s most anticipated blockbusters will make Rebecca Ferguson a movie theater mainstay. But to get there she had to go around the world—and out of it, too.

-  HANNA FLINT

No one signs up for a Mission: Impossible movie without expecting to do a few stunts. But back in 2014, when Rebecca Ferguson was filming Rogue Nation, the first of the MI films in which she has starred as the international spy Ilsa Faust, the actress got something of a surprise. In a scene set at the Vienna Opera House, Tom Cruise (who plays the seemingly unkillable covert agent Ethan Hunt) planned for his character to exit the building, alongside Ferguson, via its roof. There was just one hitch: “She never told me—or anyone else—she was uncomfortable with heights,” Cruise says. Instead of suggesting the front door, however, Ferguson did what any self-respecting secret agent would. “She trained for it and did it. She confronted it full on,” Cruise says. “That is Rebecca. She knew it made the sequence, and she knew that she could trust me, and I could trust her. It is a lovely moment.”