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Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning director Christopher McQuarrie wanted to include a digitally de-aged Julia Roberts.

Don’t worry, Julia Roberts didn’t make a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, but there was a time when director Christopher McQuarrie was considering including her. Not only that, but she would have been digitally de-aged for the scene in question.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One included a few flashbacks to Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) life before he joined the IMF. I won’t go into detail, but it involves a woman named Marie. While speaking on Empire’s Spoiler Special Podcast (via /Film), Christopher McQuarrie discussed how he wound up considering Julia Roberts for the role.

“I said, ‘OK, if I were doing this sequence, it would be Tom in, say, 1989. McQuarrie said that Tony Scott would have directed the movie before Brian De Palma in that era. “We studied ‘Days of Thunder,’ and the style of the film, and then we thought about what it would have looked like if Tony Scott shot it. And who would that person be? I went back and looked at 1989. Who was the breakout star, the ingenue? Then, I saw ‘Mystic Pizza’ and was like ‘Oh my god.’ Julia Roberts, a then-pre-“Pretty Woman” Julia Roberts, as this young woman.’“Related

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One for what would have amounted to a cameo would have been a tall order, but throw in some pricey digital de-aging for all of the actors, and the budget just couldn’t take it.“

The only way I could have seen doing the sequence justice was to somehow convince Julia Roberts to come in and be this small role at the beginning of this story,[using de-aging]” McQuarrie said. “And as you’re conceptually thinking through it, you think, ‘Now everyone’s going to focus on the de-aging for Julia Roberts, Esai and Tom, Henry Czerny,’ and then I received the bill before their salaries had been factored in. If you put two or three of them together in a single shot, the cost would have been the same as a train. It was a force multiplier for — and how we shoot scenes, the fluidity and the camera movements. That would not have been the style of the film in 1989. That wouldn’t make sense if you were shooting an ’89 ‘Mission’ like a 2023 ‘Mission.’“Christopher McQuarrie has previously spoken of digitally de-aging Tom Cruise for the

Dead Reckoning flashback scene, and why he ultimately decided against it. You can check out a review of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One from our own Chris Bumbray right here, and be sure to let us know what you thought of the film as well.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJVu41HTQB4