Tom Cruise keeps a few surprises up his sleeve.
His Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning co-star Hayley Atwell revealed as much at the film’s New York City premiere on Monday, after explaining that the “train carriage” stunt seen in the movie was the single most exhausting part of the shoot.
“It goes from horizontal to vertical in six seconds, so we’d have to sprint on an incline and reach the bar before we were dangling over a ravine,” Hayley told Entertainment Tonight about the sequence in the seventh instalment of the stunt-heavy franchise.
“I got adrenal fatigue at one point, and I just kind of looked like a zombie, and Tom was like, ‘Are you OK?’ and I was like, ‘I don’t even know, Tom, what’s going on with me. I don’t know,’” she told ET.
“And he said, ‘I know what you need. You need some chocolate.’”
“And I was like, ‘Yes I do,’” she continued. “And he whipped out some chocolate and gave it to me and made me feel amazing, and then we were able to do it a couple more times.”
While the Christopher McQuarrie film reunites Tom with fellow Mission: Impossible veterans Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and Rebecca Ferguson, Hayley is a newcomer opposite its physically daring star.
“I can give you a tour of all the hills I ran, where I cried, where I peed behind a tree, where I wanted to take a nap, where I call my mom going, ‘I don’t think I can do this,’” Hayley told ET.
“It was that, but it was a lot of mobility training, injury prevention training.”
Tom himself has presumably benefited from such training after past Mission: Impossible injuries.
The actor thanked fans for making Top Gun: Maverick his first $100 million opening last year by skydiving out of an airplane. That particular stunt was only one of many expected in Dead Reckoning, including one where Tom rode a motorcycle off a cliff.
While adrenal fatigue is currently not accepted as a medical diagnosis, it describes a combination of lightheadedness, body aches and exhaustion.
According to the Mayo Clinic, these symptoms arise after relentless fight-or-flight arousal in the adrenal glands.
As for the chocolate, Hayley said this wasn’t the only sweetness Tom shared on set.
The Marvel star shared over the weekend that her co-star was so unbothered by the recent rumours of their alleged romance that he told her: “You know exactly who you are. You know what you’re about. And that is the only thing that matters.”
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One hits cinemas later this week.