The Mission Impossible star with REALLY killer thighs!
REBECCA FERGUSON is calculating how, if she really wanted to, she could bump me off. i think she’s joking, but i’m in no doubt that if it was her mission to bring me down, the 31-yearold actress — all 5ft 7in of her — would have no trouble at all.
Ferguson plays ilsa, a mysterious assassin in the new mission impossible film, rogue nation (out here on July 30). i keep re-running footage from the film in my head, and i can’t get rid of one image: Ferguson hurling herself at a bad guy, flying through the air and — there’s no other way to describe it — scissoring his neck with her legs.
‘you mean the thigh killer move,’ she said, smiling. ‘i love it. Why? Because it’s like a dance move.’
Ferguson enjoys the Argentinian tango. ‘There’s an incredible dynamic, when you twist your body and spring up,’ she said, stretching out to demonstrate the dangerous choreography, and almost taking off from the settee.
The thigh killer is ilsa’s signature move in mission impossible 5, which finds Tom Cruise back as top agent ethan hunt, along with the rest of the team: Jeremy renner, Simon pegg and Ving rhames.
rebecca, Tom and director Christopher MCQUARRIE thought ilsa needed to have her own brutal way of killing.
it was Wade eastwood, the film’s stunt co- ordinator, who devised the killer thigh sequence. Ferguson, Cruise and MCQUARRIE watched as rebecca’s stunt double Lucy Cork performed the deadly move.
‘i’m a small girl, and these are big men, and it’s so not expected that i would be able to kick ass with lethal force,’ rebecca said, with some satisfaction.
Cruise and MCQUARRIE began showing an interest in the Swedish-born actress when she starred in the BBC Sunday night drama The White Queen.
She was filming The red Tent in morocco when she got the call to meet with mi5’s director and leading man. Within days, she’d been given the part, and began a rigorous gym programme.
‘They checked my physique. They had to know whether i could run, because for the stunt work they have to know that you are capable of doing it without tearing muscle tissue.
‘it was six hours a day, six times a week — for six weeks. i forced myself to go to the gym. it was my mission,’ rebecca told me as we sat in the lounge at the boutique London hotel that’s her home-away-from-home when she’s in the UK; her real home is in the remote Swedish fishing village of Simrishamn, where she lives with her eight-year-old son and boyfriend.
on set, she and her colleagues spent a lot of time talking about old movies. ‘Tom and Chris are walking cinema dictionaries. i’d have to go home and look up all the references they’d made,’ she said.
her character in the film is a 21stcentury woman; but there’s also a hint of classic movie starlet. Cruise sent her old hitchcock films to view, such as notorious, and several other movies starring ingrid Bergman.
it’s no accident that she’s called ilsa — the name of Bergman’s character in Casablanca. ‘And we filmed in Casablanca, too,’ she said. ‘Though i don’t say “play it again, ethan”.’
her face was bare of make-up and i mentioned that there’s a resemblance to the great Swedish actress — a compliment she sidestepped with a laugh.
on the day we met, she had been filming with meryl Streep and hugh Grant in the Stephen Frears film Florence Foster Jenkins. (She plays the mistress of Grant’s character.)
She remarked that she had learned a lot from working with Streep, and was full of admiration for the ‘wickedly funny’ star.
And on that film at least, no one dies because of her killer thighs.