Tom Cruise has a nickname for Hayley Atwell. It came about, Atwell explains, because of her willingness to do just about anything on the set of the Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. When her co-star Cruise or director Christopher McQuarrie (known as “McQ”) would ask for to perform something outlandish, or difficult, or well, impossible, Atwell would simply answer: How far? How high? How many times? And so, presumably pronounced with a shiny Hollywood conviction, “Hayley” became “Hell yeah”. “I was matching Tom and McQ’s work ethic,” she recalls with a justified note of pride. “I was willing, always willing, to show up and try something.”
Good thing, as winning a part in the film – the seventh instalment in the beloved blockbuster franchise – sounds tougher than getting into MI6. From Abu Dhabi, just one stop of a globe-trotting press tour, Atwell tells me about the screen test, which involved a training audition with stuntman Wade Eastwood. “It was entirely designed to find out my natural strengths, and what I actually enjoyed doing,” the actor, 41, says. They discovered that drifting (when you guide a car around a corner by oversteering) and fighting with props came easily. “If I had knives in my hand, I could just do it a lot faster,” Atwell explains, presumably the kind of sentence that comes naturally after filming a Mission: Impossible project.
After she was offered the role, Atwell underwent a five-month, five-day-a-week training period, a necessity when you have to do all your own stunts. Creating her character was a collaborative process with Cruise and McQ, she explains. Together, they found a “common film language” by making their way through titles like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Paper Moon, and The Train. You name a ‘70s heist movie, they probably watched it. The result was Grace, a slippery pickpocket who is both help and hindrance on Ethan Hunt’s latest go around, which sees him face down a shadowy, omnipotent force in an ever-changing array of locations worldwide. I am hesitant to give too much away – preview screenings involved both NDAs and vigilant ushers – but Atwell describes Grace as a “hyper independent person” acting on a “trauma response” to an event in her past. “It sounds very trite for me to say all this, and a bit wishful in a Mission: Impossible action franchise, but I never wanted her to be just one thing,” she says. “It had to have something going on beneath the surface.”
Born to a British mother and an American father, Atwell grew up in Ladbroke Grove, an area she describes as “a microcosm of how the world is”: “I was very much exposed to lots of different groups of people, and I think that created my interest in the arts and the importance of storytelling.” After attending the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Atwell trod many of London’s boards (she earned her first Olivier Award nomination for her performance in A View From the Bridge) and landed dependable TV parts. Marvel came calling with the role of Peggy Carter, an MI6 agent and Steve Rogers’ (Chris Evans) love interest, in Captain America: The First Avenger. “I’d never read a comic book, and I turned up the same way as if I were turning up for a play,” she says. A TV series based on her character, Agent Carter, ran for two seasons.
Another area of expertise? Period dramas. Atwell led the BBC’s acclaimed 2017 adaptation of Howards End, and has had parts in Testament of Youth, Mansfield Park, and The Duchess. She has starred as a scene-stealing, tragic sister twice: in the film version of Brideshead Revisited and the TV adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. If you were to draw a Venn diagram of “British Stuff” and “Action Star”, the overlap would take corporeal form in Atwell, and yet, somehow, she has never appeared in a Bond film. Not once. When I mention this, she laughs: the type of giggle every British actor must produce when the Bond question arises.
Sure enough, Atwell does have a Bond story. Early in her career, she declined an audition for the spy franchise, just as she was to appear in a production of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara at the National Theatre in 2008. “I thought, I don’t want my youth and my beauty to be an overriding currency in this profession, because I feel like that might be a trap for my ability to develop my brain and my skill,” she says. “I didn’t feel fully formed yet to be able to handle being in that kind of world – the Bond girl is a very different beast compared to Peggy Carter or Grace. There was a level of powerful, sexual, potential objectification that I was seeing in the earlier Bonds.” In the following decades – there have been four Bond films since – Atwell says that “everything’s moving forward”, noting that “the franchise is much more responsive to how women want to be represented in those movies.”
Atwell speaks with the poise (and patience) of someone who has spent decades in a trying industry. Mission brought some of its own challenges, namely rumours she was dating Cruise, but Atwell is now engaged to music producer Ned Wolfgang Kelly. When I ask how she feels, on the precipice of starring in the summer’s biggest movie and looking back on her career, she is, once again, circumspect. “I’ve built momentum. I’ve gotten better because I’ve been able to practise,” Atwell says. “I’ve had the privilege of being employed enough times, to offend and get to reoffend again, to be bad, and then continue to be bad and still allowed to be bad. There’s a freedom that comes with that.”
What’s next? She has a long list of directors with whom she’d like to work. She’d love to do another play. But first: a lot more Mission. Without giving too much away, Grace is set up to play an even bigger role in the next film. Daunting? Yes. All-encompassing? Most definitely. “It’s been nearly four years of my life, I’ve not had any availability at all,” Atwell says, before adding a characteristically buoyant spin. “I’m under no illusion that being besides one of the most famous men in the world changes a potential glare on me.”
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is in cinemas July 10
Henry Wong is a senior culture writer at Esquire, working across digital and print. He covers film, television, books, and art for the magazine, and also writes profiles.
