Mission: Impossible 8 Star Tom Cruise

‘Mission: Impossible 8’ Casts ‘Ted Lasso’ Star to Join Tom Cruise

With Mission: Impossible 8 set to premiere next summer, Ted Lasso star Hannah Waddingham has joined Tom Cruise for the upcoming action-packed film. 

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Director of Mission: Impossible 8 Christopher McQuarrie made the announcement on Friday (March 10th) through his Instagram account. “And Hannah Waddingham…” McQuarrie declared. He also used the hashtags #Godspeed and #DeadReckoning. 

The 2024 film is part two of Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning. The seventh film is will hit theaters on July 14, 2023. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the seventh film will bring back Henry Czerny as IMF director Eugene Kittridge. In the first film, which premiered in 1996, Czerny’s character made the iconic exchange with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, “Kittridge, you’ve never seen me very upset.”

Details about what role Waddingham will have in the upcoming film haven’t been disclosed yet. In the meantime, she will be one of the hosts of the upcoming Eurovision Song Contest, which will take place in Liverpool between May 9th and May 13th. 

Tom Cruise Talks About the Most Dangerous ‘Mission: Impossible 7’ Stunt

In a 2021 interview with Empire, Tom Cruise spoke about the craziest stunts he did while filming Mission: Impossible 7. He spoke about the stun there he was riding his motorcycle off the edge of a cliff. 

“If the wind was too strong, it would blow me off the ramp,” Cruise stated. “The helicopter [filming the stunt] was a problem, because I didn’t want to be hammering down that ramp at top speed and get hit by a stone. Or if I departed in a weird way, we didn’t know what was going to happen with the bike.”

The Mission: Impossible 7 star also stated that he had about six seconds from once he departed the ramp to pull the chute. “I don’t want to get tangled in the bike. If I do, that’s not going to end well.”

Along with discussing the stunt, Tom Cruise also spoke about him yelling at Mission: Impossible 7 crew members for not following COVID-19 protocols on the set. “All those emotions were going through my mind,” he explained. “I was thinking about the people I work with, and my industry. And for the whole crew to know that we’d started rolling on a movie was just a huge relief. It was very emotional, I gotta tell you.”

Cruise also recalled first hearing about the pandemic. “We were reading about the pandemic,” he says. “McQ [McQuarrie’s nickname] was in Venice. I was working on prepping Mission and working on Top Gun.” 

Cruise went on to add that he received confuses messages from the studios of his film. “They said, ‘Don’t come. Just wait a beat,’” he said However, before the “beat” had ben counted, the studio dropped the bad news. “They said, ‘We’re shutting the film down.’ It really just dropped like a hammer, to be honest.”