It has now been revealed that Mission Impossible - Fallout almost cast a third big-name star to join Tom Cruise and Henry Cavill’s brutal bathroom fight scene. The sixth entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise, Fallout debuted in 2018. The film was a critical and commercial success, impressing Mission: Impossible agnostics and becoming the franchise’s highest-grossing movie.
While the sixth film marked the sixth appearance for Mission: Impossible star Tom Cruise, Fallout was Henry Cavill’s entree into the franchise. The Witcher and Superman actor joined Fallout as the film’s villain, extremist John Lark, who’s disguised as CIA operative August Walker. Cruise and Cavill team up in a now-famous bathroom brawl, going after who they think to be the middleman of a plutonium sale in the restroom of a Paris nightclub. The scene showcases the rigorous demands of the Fallout set, with the actors smashing mirrors and pummeling through walls at a breakneck pace.
Now Fallout director Christopher McQuarrie tells THR that the demanding sequence was originally going to include another well-known actor in the scene’s third role. The unnamed star was put into a “fight evaluation” but couldn’t keep up with Cruise and Cavill. Instead, one of the film’s stuntmen, Liang Yang, was inserted into the punishing fight scene. “It’s a sequence other actors, when learning the level of commitment required, simply opted out,” says McQuarrie.
Had this anonymous star participated in the bathroom brawl, he would have been abruptly killed off. McQuarrie explains that the goal was to incite a sort of whiplash in the viewer, who would be initially shocked by the actor’s presence, then stunned again by his sudden death. It’s a similar technique that Hitchcock employed in Psycho, later lovingly imitated in the opening scene of Scream: killing off a would-be star to unmoor the viewer. McQuarrie doesn’t reveal who the familiar name is, but perhaps in time the director will unmask Fallout’s secret cameo.
Passing the “fight evaluation” for Fallout was undoubtedly a difficult task. The stunts in the Mission: Impossible films are notoriously punishing, with Cruise himself the biggest glutton for punishment. While filming Fallout, the star broke his ankle when jumping from building to building - a stunt that the actor deemed “easy.” Set footage from the upcoming Mission: Impossible 7 proves that Cruise is showing no signs of stopping, with the actor parachuting out of a helicopter, among other daredevil stunts.
Source: THR