Behind the mission: Cast of ‘Final Reckoning’ talk stunts, stress, and stealing set props

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — Turns out the most impossible mission wasn’t saving the world, it was keeping a straight face during our interviews with the cast of “Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning.” With Tom Cruise off doing Cruise things, ABC4 Film Critic and “See It or Skip It” creator Patrick Beatty sat down with Hayley Atwell, Simon Pegg, Pom Klementieff, Greg Tarzan Davis, and Angela Bassett to talk about everything from filming stunts to who took what off the set.

In the latest and perhaps last installment, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) returns for one last impossible mission in this high-stakes finale. Facing off against a rogue AI known as “The Entity,” Hunt and his IMF team must prevent a global catastrophe, with allies old and new, including Grace (Hayley Atwell) and President Sloane (Angela Bassett), the team races against time to neutralize the threat.

Q: Is there any type of ‘Mission: Impossible’ initiation for the new actors?

Simon Pegg: “This whole film is an initiation. Trust me.”

Angela Bassett: “Well, fortunately, I don’t have to go on any of those crazy stunt adventures or have to get into stunt training, which a lot of my colleagues have had to do.”

Greg Tarzan: “You have to just be trained for everything in these films, where like, “Top Gun,” that was flying an F-18. So that was that type of training. We’re just trained for everything.”

Pom Klementieff: “Yeah, and you have to do things practically, you know? Oftentimes in big tentpole movies, they want to keep the actors safe and just do everything with CGI and stunt doubles. For this one, it’s really celebrated to do things like train hard and do everything yourself,” which is amazing.

Simon Pegg: “I was kind of like the den mother of the new cast because we were all living together in Norway and Rome, and we did ‘Dead Reckoning,’ and they’d always come to me. ‘What? How is this? What are we doing? What does this mean?’

Angela Bassett: “Whether it’s jumping out of planes or, you know, all the possibilities and you don’t know which one you’re going to be called upon to do … So to be asked to jump out of a plane and not actually do it in the movie. Why did I do it in the first place?”

Simon Pegg: “That alone, just the kind of baptism of fire that is making these films. We make them in a very particular way. You have to be match fit. You have to be ready for anything. It’s, It’s an initiation in itself. It really is.”

Q: Hayley, I had no idea you had an encounter with a polar bear. Can you tell me about that?

Hayley Atwell: “Yes. There was a couple of them. The first one was having to stop filming and to get back onto the boats that we were living on, because the polar bear was walking across the set and we could see it in the distance through binoculars very far away, and we were just in awe of this kind of gray dot that we could see in the distance.

Then we were playing cards below deck one night, and, there was this kind of excitement upstairs. We all put our layers of clothes on and ran up onto the deck of the boat, and we saw a polar bear walking towards us and then getting on its hind legs and putting its front leg, its front paws on the side of the ship. And so we were really lucky, but also, there was a definitely a responsibility to make sure that we were respecting this environment and eventually the polar bear walked off. But it’s just an image I’ll never forget.”

Q: Was there anything that you took off of set? Given this has been such a long journey for you?

Simon Pegg: “I’m not the thief. Hayley Atwell is the queen of nicking things from the set.”

Hayley Atwell: “I stole quite a lot of things from this movie.”

Simon Pegg: “Now, I don’t know if she was doing method acting, you know, because Grace is obviously a skilled thief.”

Hayley Atwell: “I think playing Grace would have rubbed off on me, but I ended up stealing a salt and pepper shaker, an ashtray, the key, a poison pill, a necklace, a watch, some fossils, documents I found in a drawer, and some broken glass.”

Simon Pegg: “She’s the queen of pilfering.”

Greg Tarzan: “I didn’t steal anything from set. I took like my sweater home, the sweatpants. You know, when I’m changing into my costume.”

Pom Klementieff: “I stole what I call a'”husband-beater’, because you can’t say ‘wife-beater’ anymore. So I call it the ‘husband beater.’ You know what I’m wearing at the first fight?”

Greg Tarzan: “Tom said he stole a plane from the set.”

Angela Bassett: ‘No. I challenged Tom to a dance-off. I don’t remember what the song was, but it was pretty good. It had a good groove. He was down for the cause. I mean, we were celebrating him.”

Hayley Atwell: “And even last night at dinner last night, I stole a bottle of Tom’s hot sauce that the restaurant had made specially for him. So, yeah, that came home with me.”

Simon Pegg: “I should have something. Do you know what I mean? I would like a mask or something.”

Hayley Atwell: “I think the trick is just distraction and just having, sort of like a very innocent-looking face, and, you know, being polite and British means that actually, you can get away with a lot.”