M:I-7 Almost Had A De-Aged Julia Roberts

J.J. Abrams’ “Mission: Impossible III” attempted to show Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) having a life outside of work, which ultimately equated to one early scene where he has friends around for a BBQ, and we meet his new love interest.

The more recent “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” takes a different approach, showing us briefly a look at the life of Hunt before he joined the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) and what led to him being a part of the team.

The brief flashback sequences early in the film see a brunette woman named Marie being murdered by Esai Morales’ antagonist Gabriel. Ethan gets framed for her death – leading to his joining the IMF rather than go to prison.

Mariela Garriga plays the role of Marie in the scenes, but in a recent spoiler podcast for Empire, director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie talked about the actress he originally considered casting – Julia Roberts:

“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?

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.’ 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.

He then says as conceptually they were going through it, he realised “all anybody’s going to be thinking about is the de-aging” of the characters. Then the cost of the de-aging for these people came into consideration, combined with their fees:

“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.’”

With the film already going significantly over budget due to its multiple pandemic shutdowns, the idea was scrapped with the flashback scenes minimised in the final film to mere seconds of screen time with Garriga taking on the Marie role. Ultimately only Morales undergoes de-aging for the scenes with the shots unfolding from Hunt’s perspective.

“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” is in cinemas now.