Hayley Atwell Was Really Handcuffed To Tom Cruise For Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning's Rome Car Chase

"Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One" sounds like a love letter to its star, Tom Cruise. More specifically, to his insane dedication to performing his own, highly dangerous stunts. Much like the latest installment in another blockbuster franchise that's basically just one long stunt highlight reel, "Fast X," "Dead Reckoning" opens with a car chase through Rome. But instead of a giant rolling bomb that threatens to blow up the Vatican, this sequence needed only to set the projectile that is Tom Cruise loose in the Italian capital. Well, Cruise and a few co-stars, most of whom weren't quite prepared to keep up with the leading man's appetite for extreme physical feats.

The seventh "Mission: Impossible" movie is full of such feats, performed by Cruise himself. Most notably, a motorbike stunt that saw the star jumping from a cliff and free-falling before pulling his parachute at the last minute — a stunt he performed for real, six times. Oh, and he also climbed on top of a real train traveling 60 mph for one of the film's big fights. But the Rome car chase is significant for the way in which it seems to have dragged other actors into Cruise's intense love for putting himself at the center of perilous situations.

Co-star Hayley Atwell, for instance, found herself riding shotgun beside the veteran star on his Rome rampage. And it seems, rather than being scarred for life by the experience, the actor actually found the whole thing quite fulfilling.

The Rome car chase involves Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt and Hayley Atwell's Grace fleeing from agents Jasper Briggs (Shea Wingham) and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis). Davis has spoken about being shocked to learn at the last second that Wingham would be the stunt driver, even texting his mother in a panic about the stunt.

But however intense Davis' experience, it couldn't have been worse than Atwell's, who was actually handcuffed to her co-star for the scene. In a CinemaBlend interview, director Christopher McQuarrie confirmed the two actors were indeed handcuffed together, and explained how Cruise's car had been modified to "increase its power, which made it very unpredictable." Which when combined with the fact Cruise was handcuffed to Atwell, makes the whole sequence that much more impressive, not to mention unfathomably dangerous. 

McQuarrie continued, "You're very fortunate in that you had somebody like Tom Cruise behind the wheel, admittedly with one hand cuffed to somebody else. But Tom has so much experience shooting car chases that he was able to safely navigate all that." Still, McQuarrie made sure to add, "I got in that car for five minutes. I would never get in that car again."

But for Atwell, getting in the car seems to have been a relative pleasure, simply by virtue of the fact she and Cruise were able to pull off the whole thing in a two-shot. She said:

"[Usually] it's take three would've been great for you, take four would've been great for that person, so they would've cut to singles. But if you notice, Tom and I are in a two-shot the whole time [...] to be able to achieve that in a two-shot within the context of a car chase sequence is a huge, huge achievement."

Hayley Atwell clearly impressed Christopher McQuarrie, who praised the actor for "doing what she did in the passenger seat of that car and being able to maintain her composure and give the performance that she gave." The director added:

"The fact that it's the two of them in two-shots together doing physical comedy, which is difficult around a dining room table, they're doing it at 80 miles an hour in a tiny little car on cobblestone streets in Rome. You can't really appreciate just what an amazing performance those two actors are giving."

Props to Cruise, then, for stunt driving his way around Rome one-handed. And props to Atwell for even agreeing to do it in the first place. She joins a very small group of performers who have entered the fray with Tom Cruise and managed to come out the other side. The only other actor in the history of "Mission: Impossible" movies who's been able to keep up with the "Top Gun: Maverick" star has been Henry Cavill, and he's maintained a similarly bonkers commitment to his own stunt work throughout his career, to the point he became an unofficial stunt coordinator on "The Witcher" season 3.

With "Dead Reckoning Part One," however, Cruise looks to have topped everything that's come before, and judging by the trailers, there are plenty of action scenes we can't wait to see.