Hayley Atwell goes from strength to strength in Dior Beauty

No more than one minute late, Hayley Atwell jumps onto our Zoom call, being perhaps the first person ever to look good on a laptop camera. The London-born actor is inquisitive from the get-go — a connoisseur and admirer of her audience, whoever they might be. She asks me what HUNGER readers are like, and her interest in understanding others while being understood herself is immediately evident. It’s no wonder one of her inspirations at a young age was Scout from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird — constantly observant and intrigued about how the world works, which is something Atwell questions consistently. “What is this culture that we’re in?” she muses. “Where is it going? Where do we want it to go? How does it align with our values?”

On a more tangible note, we began to discuss Atwell’s latest venture, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, in which she plays Grace, a former thief turned Impossible Mission Force agent. With the UK premiere for the franchise’s finale over and done with, Atwell is happy that the film is now “in the hands of the audience” — it was in itself a mission to get out into the world. Atwell first met director Christopher McQuarrie after he watched her portray Sylvia in the 2013 revival of play The Pride. He told her, “there’s something that you can do on stage — a particular quality that you have,” the actor relays. “And I want to bottle it and put it in a movie.”

Having that certain je ne sais quoi wasn’t enough to prevent the halting of filming multiple times, however — between a certain pandemic and the writer’s strike, it took dedication and five years to get the film to cinemas. “Tom [Cruise] was having to find ways of keeping the movie going, while also encouraging other studios to keep their movies going,” Atwell tells me. “Really, he was working hard to make sure that the industry was able to survive.”