Director Christopher McQuarrie reveals he considered to reach out to the 'Pretty Woman' star to de-age her for a flashback sequence alongside Tom Cruise in the latest 'M: I' movie.
- Jul 28, 2023
AceShowbiz - "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One" could have been more star-studded than its final version that is current playing in theaters. Having Tom Cruise lead the pack that also includes Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Hayley Atwell, Rebecca Ferguson (II) and many others, the movie almost got an A-list boost from Julia Roberts.
Director Christopher McQuarrie has revealed that he considered casting the awards-winning actress for a small role in the movie. Appearing on Empire magazine's "Spoiler Special Film" podcast, he said that he wanted to de-age the "Pretty Woman" star for a flashback sequence alongside Cruise.
"I said, 'OK, if I were doing this sequence, it would be Tom in, say, 1989,' " McQuarrie shared. "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?"
He continued, "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.' "
At that point, McQuarrie said he decided he only would want to de-age Cruise for the flashback if he could "somehow convince Julia Roberts to come in and be this small role at the beginning of this story."
However, he eventually opted out of digital de-aging as the fees the production would incur from the VFX and casting Roberts were not worth what he envisioned for the scene. "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 [Morales], and Tom, and Henry Czerny,' " he explained.
"And then I got the bill for de-aging those people before their salaries were even factored into it," the filmmaker went on noting. "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."
McQuarrie previously said that he scrapped plans to de-age Cruise in the flashbacks scenes and a cold open because he found it distracting. "I was so distracted by an actor that I had known for however long was now suddenly this young person," the 54-year-old told GamesRadar.
