Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Director Considered Casting De-Aged Julia Roberts for Flashback

One scene in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One saw a flashback to an earlier point in Ethan Hunt's (Tom Cruise) career where he had a deadly run-in with Gabriel (Esai Morales), with a victim of this collision having her identity obscured. According to director Christopher McQuarrie, there was a point in developing the movie where he considered offering audiences a better look at how this scene would unfold, which saw him take the metatextual approach of wanting to cast an up-and-coming star from the time period of the flashback, as he settled on Julia Roberts. However, the costs of de-aging Roberts, as well as Cruise and Morales, in addition to the attention paid specifically to the cameo saw McQuarrie reimagine the sequence. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is in theaters now.

"The best de-aging I've ever looked at, all I kept thinking is, 'Wow, this de-aging is really good.' I'm in no way, shape, or form connecting to the story," McQuarrie shared with Empire Magazine's Spoiler Special podcast, per /Film. "If you hire Esai Morales and Tom Cruise and de-age them, and then hire some 23-year-old woman to be their confidant in Berlin in 1989, that's bullsh-t ... So now we started looking at it and saying, 'Who's Marie going to be? Who from that era would Marie have been?'"

He continued, "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.'"

The sequence in the film did leave an impact on audiences, even if the identity of the woman was obscured, though we can't rule out learning more about the figure in Dead Reckoning Part Two. Given the budget of pulling off the cameo with Roberts, McQuarrie ended up putting funds in a more fulfilling place.

"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," the director admitted. "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.' And then 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."

Tom Cruise is back as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, which premiered in theaters on July 12th. It's the beginning of the end for the action-packed franchise, as Cruise reteams with longtime collaborator and filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie for more death-defying and breathtaking stunts. Hunt and allies Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) attempt to track down a new weapon with the power to tear the world apart. Actors Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, and Esai Morales join the cast for the latest installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise, which is set to wrap up with Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two.

Would you have liked to have seen Roberts in the role? Let us know in the comments!