Anything is (Im)possible

As she joins the Mission: Impossible juggernaut for its seventh instalment, Dead Reckoning Part One, leading lady Hayley Atwell reveals what it's like to learn the art of filmcraft from Tom Cruise and how she is redefining what success means to her

- Christina Newland

WHETHER SHE IS slow-dancing with Captain America to wartime big band music in Avengers: Endgame, taking to the London stage in adaptations of Henrik Ibsen and Shakespeare, or hanging off a Venetian bridge by her ankles in a high-octane action sequence for Mission: Impossible's latest two-parter Dead Reckoning, Hayley Atwell has proven herself a force on screen, transcending leading lady' stereotypes and proving herself a more-than-worthy foil to the men acting opposite her.

When we chat, Atwell is fresh from a long workout she's grown used to training every part of her body not simply for aesthetics but for the strength and injury avoidance that four years of practical stunt-work opposite Tom Cruise might require. She pushes her curtain of dark hair off her neck and says breezily that she's "in a T-shirt like a sweaty teenager", but she looks, as you might expect, as lovely as ever.

She's a garrulous and cheerful conversationalist, offering up an anecdote on the surreality of making a movie like Mission: Impossible.

"At one point, they said to us, 'We really I want you to have a sequence where you and Tom run with each other, and you're going to be handcuffed to him.

And you'll be in heels. On the streets of Rome. I was like: 'I'm running next to Mr Movie Running Man. The iconic Tom Cruise run,"" she says. Even she, at times, seems to find it difficult to get her head around it all.

Playing an enigmatic new character named Grace opposite Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt, with shifting motives that make her both a source of fascination and of danger, Atwell describes Grace as "an absolute lone wolf. The idea that anyone would come to her and work with her, she's thinking: 'What's the agenda?' So every move that she makes, she upends Ethan. Which has a beautiful comedic chemistry to it," says Atwell.