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The cold open of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One nearly featured a de-aged Tom Cruise. However, it recently came to light that the film wanted to cast another A-lister to pair with him in this scene.
Christopher McQuarrie, director of the latest Mission: Impossible flick, revealed that the cold open for the film nearly featured Julia Roberts de-aged with Cruise.
Speaking on the Empire Spoiler Special Film podcast, McQuarrie said, “I said, ‘Ok, if I were doing this sequence, it would be Tom in, say, 1989. It would be Tony Scott’s ‘Mission: Impossible.’ That’s who would have been directing the movie before Brian De Palma, you know, in that era.”
He continued, “We looked at ‘Days of Thunder’ and we looked at the style of it, and we started thinking what would it look like if Tony Scott had shot this, and who would it have been? I looked back at who was the ingenue, who was the breakout star in 1989? And right around then was ‘Mystic Pizza.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God. Julia Roberts, a then-pre-‘Pretty Woman’ Julia Roberts, as this young woman.’”
But it wasn't as simple as just casting Roberts and being done with it. “The only way I could have seen doing the sequence justice [using de-aging] was to somehow convince Julia Roberts to come in and be this small role at the beginning of this story. And of course, as you’re conceptually going through it, you’re like, ‘Now all anybody’s going to be doing is thinking about the de-aging of Julia Roberts, and Esai, and Tom, and Henry Czerny,” McQuarrie revealed.
Furthermore, hiring someone of Roberts' caliber would be expensive. “I got the bill for de-aging those people before their salaries were even factored into it, and if you put two of them in a shot together, or three of them in a shot together, it would have been as expensive as the train by the time we were done,” he said.
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Now, we have seen films as recent as Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny de-age their stars for an extended cold open — heck, The Irishman de-aged its leading trio for the entirety of the three-and-a-half hour runtime — but Mission: Impossible films already cost a pretty penny with its high-flying stunts and A-list ensemble.
While we didn't get to see Julia Roberts on-screen with Tom Cruise in a Mission: Impossible film, here's hoping it could happen in the future. The Pretty Woman actress is coming off a return to the rom-com genre and her first film role in four years, Ticket to Paradise.
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is in theaters now.
