We already know that the opening sequence of recent action movie sequel Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One almost included a de-aged Tom Cruise, but now director Christopher McQuarrie has also revealed that a de-aged Julia Roberts almost joined him. Appearing on the Empire Spoiler Special podcast, McQuarrie reveals that he wanted the effects wizard to turn back the clock on Roberts, taking her back to her Mystic Pizza days.
“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. 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 to achieve his light bulb moment of adding an early years Julia Roberts to the Mission: Impossible team, McQuarrie decided that he would need the actress to sign on to what would only be a “small role”.
“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 (Morales) and Tom, and Henry Czerny.’”
Ultimately, McQuarrie felt that the de-aging of such major stars would end up being far too distracting, with Mariela Garriga playing the role that Roberts had been penciled in for.
All That De-aging Would Have Been Rather Costly
Not only that, McQuarrie soon discovered that all that de-aging would have been very expensive. In fact, he says it would have cost as much as the epic train sequence that takes place during the finale.
“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. It was so … the force multiplier of — and the way we shoot scenes, and the fluidity, and the camera movement. And of course, that wouldn’t be the style of the movie in 1989. That wouldn’t make sense if you were shooting an ’89 ‘Mission’ like a 2023 ‘Mission.’”
Starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Mariela Garriga, and Henry Czerny, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One finds the IMF team doing battle with a powerful rogue AI known as "the Entity".
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is out now in theaters, with a sequel, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two, set to be released on June 28, 2024.