Tom Cruise wasn’t the only impressive stuntman on the set of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.
During a recent appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Hayley Atwell revealed that she was almost nine months pregnant while shooting one of the film’s fight scenes.
“During this fight sequence, we came back to it a few times to add a few elements to it, and in this clip, I’m actually eight and a half months pregnant,” Atwell told Fallon before the clip was shown on the show. “I’m serious, yes!”
The Agent Carter star said that “everyone was so supportive” and they offered to have a stunt double step in for her to finish out the scene. Nonetheless, Atwell was eager to perform the stunt on her own.
“I have to say, I was taken such good care of, everyone was so supportive,” she said. “And they were like, ‘Oh, you can sit down and we’ll have a stunt double do it,’ and I was like, ‘No, I’ve worked too hard, let me do it!’ So I did it, and here it is.”
Atwell and The Final Reckoning cast also notably learned how to dogsled when they traveled to Norway for filming. Of the experience, she told The Hollywood Reporter dog sledding in the Arctic was “Invigorating, empowering, mind-blowing, surreal,” and they even had to pause filming when a polar bear “walked across the set.”
“We had to stop shooting because a polar bear walked across the set, and that is something I’d never thought I would hear myself say,” she said. “We lived on an icebreaker ship. We played cards at night, and we ate together. It was really important that we cultivated a sense of rapport and teamwork so that we were able to trust each other on the ice.”
