Christopher McQuarrie Considered Casting a De-Aged Julia Roberts in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One was released earlier this month to stellar reviews from both fans and critics alike. The movie is action-packed with a story that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Tom Cruise returned to the franchise to play his long-standing character Ethan Hunt, and he was joined by Hayley Atwell, Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Vanessa Kirby, and Henry Czerny along with newcomers Shea Whigham, Pom Klementieff, Esai Morales, Charles Parnell, Indira Varma, Mark Gatiss, Cary Elwes, Nick Offerman, Janet McTeer, Hannah Waddingham, and Holt McCallany.
But there was almost one more big name added to the cast lineup, and that was Academy Award-winner Julia Roberts. There’s a scene in the movie in which we see some brief black-and-white flashbacks revealing how Esai Morales' antagonist character, Gabriel, shares a history with Ethan. We learn Gabriel murdered a woman named Marie and seemingly framed Ethan for her death, leading Ethan to being presented with a choice between going to prison or working for the U.S. government.
In the film, Marie is played by an actress named Mariela Garriga. But according to director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie, he originally considered casting a de-aged Roberts in the role.
In the first part of Empire's Dead Reckoning Spoiler Special podcast interview (via/Film), McQuarrie spoke about doing a deep dive into digital de-aging to see if that would be a viable option for the Marie flashbacks in the film. Overall, he didn't seem convinced it would work. "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," he said. But he went down the research path anyway, which briefly had him considering reaching out to Julia Roberts to play Marie.
"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 bull***. So now we started looking at it and saying, 'Who's Marie going to be? Who from that era would Marie have been?'"
McQuarrie 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 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 said. "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.'"
It’s true that it would have been a huge cost to add Roberts to the cast, just for her salary alone, not even factoring in the de-aging cost! And people would have been so focused on the cameo that it could have detracted from the story. So it was probably a good call to just go with the new actress, who ended up being great in the role.