Mission Impossible 7: Vanessa Kirby and Hayley Atwell Talk Mask Scene

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” now playing in theaters.

The “Mission: Impossible” movies have no shortage of death-defying stunts, but the Tom Cruise-starring action franchise is known for another iconic magic trick: its mask reveals.

“Dead Reckoning Part One” features two mask reveals — in the first, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt uses a mask to infiltrate a meeting between CIA director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) and officials from various intelligence agencies about a rogue artificial intelligence system, known as the Entity. The other is a face swap between Hayley Atwell’s Grace, a pickpocket who becomes embroiled in IMF’s hunt for the Entity, and Vanessa Kirby’s black-market arms dealer Alanna Mitsopolis, aka the White Widow.

“It was so much fun. It was the first time two women have got to do that,” Kirby told Variety on the red carpet at the film’s New York premiere.

“It was such an amazing gift — because I love Hayley — to channel her and get to play her for a bit, and to get to play somebody that was totally out of control,” she continued. “My character is usually so restrained and composed and in control; it was really, really fun to play someone a bit scrappier and a bit messier. I’m naturally more messy in real life, so I felt more at home in that sense.”

In a separate interview, Atwell echoed Kirby’s excitement, sharing that the two became particularly close while training together for the film amid the COVID-19 pandemic. “We both have a background in theater, and we’re both British, and we had mutual friends,” Atwell said.

There’s something so satisfying about watching Ethan or another character (i.e. Simon Pegg’s IMF field agent Benji or the villainous Dougray Scott posing as Ethan) rip off their prosthetic disguise to reveal themselves to a shocked party. But pulling off those scenes requires as much technical skill from the filmmakers as it showcases the actor’s versatility. (The late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s take on Cruise’s super spy persona Ethan Hunt when they pull a switcheroo during “Mission: Impossible III” is an absolute master class.)

“We’re always trying to come up with new and original ways of doing it because it’s a signature ‘Mission: Impossible’ move,” said Oscar-winning film editor Eddie Hamilton, who boarded the franchise with 2015’s “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” and continued on with 2018’s “Fallout” and the two-part “Dead Reckoning.”

Hamilton teased that there was a third mask reveal which landed on the cutting room floor “because it no longer had relevance” in the larger story. The scene was near the beginning of the movie and got nixed because it undercut the significance of Ethan’s big moment.

“It was the right decision, ultimately,” Hamilton said of scrapping the scene. “There are quite a lot of people who’ve never seen a ‘Mission: Impossible’ movie who might be coming to see this because of the goodwill of ‘Top Gun: Maverick,’ so that [first scene] is a great moment to have a mask reveal, because you’re like ‘What the hell is going on?’”

The mask moment between Grace and Alanna comes as part of “Dead Reckoning’s” complex final scheme, where Ethan and Grace must infiltrate a meeting between the White Widow and her mysterious buyer on board the Orient Express as a last ditch-effort to obtain the key to access the Entity’s source code.

The plan — Grace will go to the meeting disguised as Alanna, while Ethan assumes the identity of her brother, Zola. To do that, they must board the train without being recognized, tranquilize Alanna and Zola, meet the buyer, acquire the completed key and get off the train undetected. It’s a ruse that’d require everything to go perfectly to succeed, but when the mask machine breaks, the team must improvise, with Grace going in alone and Ethan boarding while the train is in motion.

Accomplishing the scene required some moviemaking tricks. The reason why Alanna’s face looks so perfect when being created by the mask machine is because it’s actually Kirby’s face, with her body hidden out of frame.

“Her body’s down there,” Hamilton said, motioning below the frame of his Zoom camera. “She’s keeping her eyes sharp, and the VFX team put the edge of the briefcase in across her neck and painted her out of the shot.”

Then there’s a hidden wipe between Atwell putting on the White Widow mask and Kirby standing in the mirror as “The Gray Widow” (the nickname filmmakers gave to the in-disguise character).

“What’s so elegant about it is there’s two stitches,” Hamilton said. “But you don’t realize what you’re seeing until [Grace] walks up to the mirror, and you’re like ‘Wait, what? How did that happen? That was completely seamless.'”

The trickery of the scene, Hamilton explained, is to make moviegoers feel like they’re starting their journey into the third act of the movie, but it’s a ruse. “We’re having fun with the audience’s expectations of how these films play out, which is great,” he adds.

Beyond the mechanics of the sequence, the White Widow mask moment allowed Kirby to flex her acting chops. When discussing the scene, Atwell heaped praise on Kirby’s mimicry of her mannerisms and pointed to a small tell in her co-star’s performance that distinguished the transition from Alanna to Grace.

“There’s an echo gesture that she does: when I fall backwards on the tracks in the little Fiat 500, I sort of blow hair out of my face, [Vanessa] then does it as she comes out of the cabin as Grace playing the White Widow,” Atwell explained. “She sees her brother there and she does it as well, and there’s a different kind of manic energy in her eyes. That’s all Vanessa studying me a little bit and having a great time. It is remarkable.”

In addition to being a fun visual gag, the sequence also serves as part of Grace’s redemption arc. (Originally, there was a version of this scene where Grace tranquilized Ethan, Luther [Ving Rhames] and Benji and boarded the train on her own to “try to get money from the buyer and maybe bargain her way out of the situation she’s in,” Hamilton said. “But the test audience didn’t really like that idea, so we came up with this idea.”)

Grace’s decision not to take the money was “her moment of reckoning,” Atwell said, crediting Kirby with pulling off that pivotal turn, which sets up the character’s future in part two. “I love that moment,” Atwell said of the way her fellow actor played the scene. “That’s Vanessa being brilliant and being able to show off her range.”

And the mask itself was also a helpful prop for Atwell to demonstrate Grace’s new state of mind. In fact, the way Grace strips off the Gray Widow mask at the end of the sequence was intended to feel a bit like “an exorcism.”

“It’s like I’m throwing [it] away. Like I just don’t like the version of myself I was when I had the mask on, and I’m getting it out of my system,” Atwell explained. “I’m taking off the old identity of who Grace was from the first half of the movie, when she realizes, ‘If I had taken the money, it would have been more than the key I was giving away.’”

These interviews were conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike began.