'Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation': EW preview

STARRING Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson

DIRECTED BY Christopher McQuarrie

NOT YET RATED

RELEASE DATE July 31

Over the course of the Mission: Impossible films, Tom Cruise has dangled from ceilings, jumped from motorcycles and helicopters, and scaled the tallest building in the world. So it’s safe to say the series isn’t meant for someone who has difficulty with heights. Then again… “I have crazy vertigo,” says Rebecca Ferguson (Hercules), the latest addition to the franchise. She plays an operative with ambiguous allegiances who aids Cruise’s Ethan Hunt in his fight against the Syndicate, a mysterious shadow organization that operates as an anti-IMF. “Of course, the first scene we did, Tom and me, was throwing ourselves off a Vienna rooftop. I was going to say, ‘It couldn’t get worse,’ but it definitely did.”

At least she didn’t have to hang on to the side of an Airbus A400M cargo plane as it took off—something director Christopher McQuarrie (Jack Reacher) reserved for his star. “They brought me this plane, and I was looking at the model,” says McQuarrie. “And I said to Tom, ‘What if you were on the outside of this plane?’ I was kinda half joking when I said it, and he just looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, I could do that.’” Cruise, always one to do his own stunts, was actually strapped to the plane as it was flying at 3,000 feet while filming the sequence, which gives us vertigo just thinking about it.