What viral moment in Mission: Impossible — Fallout was totally improvised? And how did the director react?
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00What viral moment in Mission Impossible Fallout was totally improvised,
00:04and how did the director react? Henry Cavill is well known for his devotion to each role he takes
00:10on, whether it's being faster than a speeding bullet as Superman to grumbling his way through
00:15a fantasy world as Geralt of Rivia on The Witcher. He knows how to give his all in every role and
00:21genuinely applies himself to every single part he accepts. In Mission Impossible Fallout,
00:26the actor took on the character of August Walker, a CIA hire tasked with keeping an eye
00:31on the entire Impossible Missions force through their Special Activities Division.
00:35That puts Walker on a collision course with death-defying Ethan Hunt,
00:39a member of the IMF and head of a globetrotting, tech-loving unit of misfits and rogues.
00:45You're not getting rid of me that easily, Hunt. That's not what this is about.
00:48After a film filled with daring do, the two men fight it out via a helicopter duel,
00:54then battle to the death on the edge of a cliff. Naturally, it's Walker who meets his
00:58maker instead of Hunt. While Walker chases Hunt up the sheer side of the rock formation,
01:03he's smashed in the eye with some of the rigging attached to one of the disabled helicopters when
01:08it comes unmoored from the rock face. He falls into the explosion caused by the now-dislodged
01:13helicopter as it hits the ground, leaving Hunt to scramble to safety.
01:17There's another, more iconic moment Cavill's character took part in,
01:21one that he admits he's seen discussed multiple times on Reddit,
01:24and you may not be surprised to learn that he improvised that bit of on-screen action.
01:29It turns out his sense of humility and his wicked sense of humor were both factors in
01:34birthing the moment to life. Here's what he says about the iconic moment he improvised during a
01:39very memorable fight scene. During the film, Hunt and Walker are involved in a bathroom brawl.
01:44As Walker approaches his opponent, he seems to be pumping his arms,
01:48reloading his biceps as if they were guns. The moment became something of an online meme.
01:58During an October 2022 appearance on the podcast Happy Sad Confused,
02:03Cavill admitted that the moment was an unscripted improvisation he came up with off the cuff,
02:08saying,
02:08"...it was a rather intense fight scene. We'd actually been shooting it for about
02:12three weeks at that stage, which is a long time in comparison to things like The Witcher,
02:17where you get a day. Everything starts to get quite sore after a while,
02:21because it's just a lot of repetitive motion."
02:23"...the connective tendons in my biceps were getting sore,
02:26and so I had to warm them up before I threw punches. And I'd literally do that to warm them up."
02:30He added in the podcast,
02:32"...I did it once, and I thought, oh God, that probably looked really stupid.
02:37I can't believe I did that. I said, sorry McHugh, I won't do that again."
02:41To Cavill's surprise, the director didn't seem to have a problem with the gesture.
02:45Cavill said,
02:46"...then I did another take without doing it, and he's like,
02:49why didn't you do that thing? That was really good. And I was like, that was good?"
02:54He said, yes, definitely do that. Do that. And so we did."
02:57Henry Cavill is no stranger to thinking on the fly while on set. He told Digital Spy ahead of
03:03the release of the second season of The Witcher in 2021 that, to better avoid missing a critical
03:08character moment from the novel series, in which Geralt communes with death, Cavill inserted some
03:13of that dialogue into a different scene. Cavill told Digital Spy that he used some of the novel's
03:19dialogue from that scene in the moment where Geralt deals with the death of his horse, Roach.
03:24"'Be not afraid of her, for she is your friend.'"
03:30Cavill told Digital Spy,
03:31"...I thought it was such a shame that we missed that beat in the story.
03:34It's such an informative beat as to Geralt's personality."
03:38Cavill also recently spoke with Looper about Enola Holmes 2,
03:42and admitted that during filming, he and actress Millie Bobby Brown
03:46indulged in some improvisational work on set. He said in the interview,
03:50"'Yes, there was plenty of improvising. There were things that don't make the cut sometimes,
03:54and there was plenty of stuff done there which was a lot of fun to do,
03:57but not fitting for the pace or the moment and how they want to present it. But lots of improv.
04:03The script was very much a shell which we worked from, and Millie's a wonderful actor to improv
04:08with." Now that's called dedicating yourself to the art of acting.