#mi7 interview

As her many online fans have noticed, Rebecca Ferguson is playful, eccentric, sometimes very candid, can turn on a dime, and does not suffer fools. Interviewing her can be like riding a wild bull, a bit unpredictable and disarming, and I found that to be very much the case with my latest interview with her about “Dune: Part Two” . The actress, if nothing else, is quite frank and sometimes even blunt about her opinions.

Yesterday, we rolled out an excerpt from our more extended interview where Ferguson admitted that she was the one that left the “Mission Impossible” franchise after ‘Dead Reckoning,’ after a three-picture deal concluded, suggesting her character was killed off after the filmmakers knew she wouldn’t be coming back.

“So when the relationship came to a point where—there was not more to be done really with Ilsa,” she said of the character’s arc. “And they will make a good, something dramatic out of [a character’s ending], and all I can do is embrace it.

Perhaps in perfectly forthright Ferguson form, when asked that she would presumably return for “Dune Messiah,” the third film in the ‘Dune’ saga that Villeneuve intends to direct, though maybe not right away, she said, yes, but maybe, and it depends on the script. Ferguson stressed she thinks Villeneuve is “exquisite” and brilliant and possibly couldn’t even turn in a bad idea if he tried, she admitted for her—as she suggested with her’ Mission Impossible’ character and why she decided not to return to the franchise—it’s always all about the script.

“I mean, I do,” she said about her interest in returning for more ‘Dune’ films, “But there’s never just [an immediate] yes or a no. I’m very much what’s on the page; the story needs to be there, and there needs to be reason.”

“But it’s Denis. Denis wouldn’t write something that I wouldn’t want to be in. I love him. I think he is exquisite; he’s exquisite as a director; I think he is so creative,” she continued. “I think he is so smart, and especially when he talks about how the world is going and the way the studio lies and the creative freedom that is gradually taken away from us. I know what he wants, which means I believe in him.”

“So if it came [to a sequel], of course, I’d want to [be in it], but also, I want to take my character into a place that’s interesting to me. There’s always the balance. If you’re going to dedicate your four months to something, it needs to be worth it, right?”

Denis Villeneuve is currently writing “Dune: Messiah” with co-screenwriter Jon Spaihts and recently said it was “almost finished.”

But in our interview with Villeneuve, where he confirmed rumors of him directing “Sicario 3” were untrue, the filmmaker would not commit to helming “Dune: Messiah” next and suggested he may need a beat first to “dream” a little more about it.

“Once the [new] movie is out, I intend to go back into the snow and dream a little bit to see if I’m going back to Arrakis right away or if I’m taking a detour just for mental sanity, to take a little distance and get rejuvenated,” he told The Playlist.

Rebecca Ferguson: "I'm done with super power women"

At the same time that Rebecca Ferguson is seen in cinemas in the blockbuster Dune: Part two, she dreams of making small films and acting in theatre. For Gunnar Rehlin, she talks about the sex scenes, the successes - and why there won't be more films with Tom Cruise.

Rebecca Ferguson is tired of playing "super power women".

-I'm good at it, but it's boring, she says.

Therefore, there will be no more impossible missions with Tom Cruise - she was asked to make another film in the series, but declined.

-For the first time I feel like a free agent (a player without a contract with a club, ed. note), she says and laughs.

Instead, she wants to enter the narrow world of cinema.

- And then I want to be on stage. I've never done it, I didn't study acting, I was almost thrown into it. So right now I'm sitting with the freedom, but I don't have any pieces. The other day I read a play for the first time, I haven't done it before.

Rebecca Ferguson wants to make smaller film and theater It might seem a little contradictory that we're sitting at the luxurious Rosewood Hotel in London talking about Rebecca's desire to make smaller, leaner films, as she's currently doing interviews for the mega-budget production Dune: Part Two, with an estimated production cost of over $120 million. This day I meet Rebecca and Stellan Skarsgård, the day after I meet Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya, Florence Pugh and the director Denis Villeneuve, among others.

But Rebecca's desire to do smaller films seems sincere. She says:

- Just this morning, I received an offer to do a small role in a studio film, for a lot of money. But I don't want to feel like I'm working just for money. I discussed this with my husband. Many people say that you should strike while the iron is hot, but I don't want to. I'm very happy with what I'm doing now, I want to do roles that neither bring me down nor lift me up. I don't care.

Now, this shouldn't be taken as saying she doesn't want to make a third Dune movie. Number two ends with a cliffhanger that points to a sequel.

-I have spoken to Denis about it and I would very much like to do number three, she says.

In the Dune films, a powerful science fiction epic set on distant planets, she plays the mother of Timothee Chalamet's protagonist.

- But I don't just see her as a mother, in Dune: Part Two she is a person who wants to get her way, says Rebecca.

"A lot of talk about the sex scenes" And that is probably something that also characterizes Rebecca Ferguson as a person. She is an extremely nice and spontaneous person, who is really not afraid to speak up when there is something she wants to protest against, but also does not shy away from handing out spontaneous hugs.

She has a very Swedish way of looking at work and its consequences – such as doing nude and sex scenes, something that was plentiful in the TV series The White Queen.

- It's not particularly convenient to do sex scenes, man, I have control over the scenes I do and what I show. This couple that Max Irons and I played in The White Queen had many children, so there was as much battlefield as sex in the series. When I was interviewed in the US, there was a lot of talk about the sex scenes and I said: "How do you make children in the US? This is how it works in Europe". By the way, the series was made in two different versions, there is more sex and nudity in the American one than the one shown in England. Sex sells, that's how it is.

Nowadays, London is both home and the hub of her career. She previously lived in Simrishamn. Her mother, who is from England, had moved here and Rebecca followed. For a while she kept the home in Simrishamn (her former partner Ludwig, with whom she has a son, lives there) parallel to the apartment she got in Richmond.

Began his career in the TV soap "New Times" But let's go even further back in time, when Rebecca lived in Stockholm and her career began, with a role in the TV soap New Times. She says that it was a coincidence that she was cast in the series, that it was because she attended Adolf Fredrik's music school and could sing.

The job with New Times caused her to miss high school. She moved away from home, took different jobs, enrolled in high school later, ended up in the United States where she was in a Swedish-American TV soap.

-Imagine being 17 years old and spending a year in Miami Beach, where the biggest problem was whether it would be the pool or the beach.

After that year, she still wasn't sure what she wanted to do.

- I traveled around, was in Thailand and got a diving certificate and wanted to become a diving instructor. I love the sea, love to dive - even though I suffer from claustrophobia. To swim with fish and to float around...

In 2011, she was back in Sweden and met the director Richard Hobert, who asked if she wanted to be in his upcoming film En enkel till Antibes. In it, Rebecca played a cold-blooded woman trying to trick an aging man, played by Sven-Bertil Taube. The film received good reviews, a foreign agent caught the eye of Rebecca and not too long after that she had auditioned for and landed the lead role in the BBC series The White Queen, which earned her a Golden Globe nomination.

Saying no to more Mission: Impossible Soon after, she caught the eye of Tom Cruise, which led to a contract for three films in the Mission: Impossible series. Since the third has been split into two films, number two (Mission: Impossible – Dead reckoning part two) will arrive later this year.

But there won't be a fourth film with Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, says Rebecca.

- I'm done, I've turned down part four.

What now occupies her most is the TV series Silo, which is filmed in a studio outside London. Rebecca stars in the dystopian sci-fi series about how humanity is forced to live in a large underground silo after the apocalypse. The first season was a great success, now the filming of season two is underway.

A few days before we meet, Rebecca was at the gala premiere of Dune: Part two in Paris. But while Stellan Skarsgård and the others went to the party, Rebecca had to take the train back to London in order to be there early the next morning at the recording.

-I film basically every day, it's a lot of stress. The others from Dune travel the world and do PR. I'm doing New York, I don't have time anymore.

Still getting starstruck Both Dune and Silo are sci-fi, but it's not like it's a genre that's particularly close to her heart. She says she enjoys the complexity of the worlds depicted and that the Dune films made this accessible in a way that the books they're based on couldn't.

- I like imagination, I'm at an age where you no longer fly on broomsticks. I want to go on adventures, and that's more than fantasy and science fiction.

A few years ago, she married Rory St Clair Gainer, with whom she has a daughter. Rebecca is keen to keep the family out of the limelight, although they sometimes accompany the filming around the world. The husband is a businessman and philanthropist.

Rebecca's work includes filming with mega stars such as Tom Cruise, Meryl Street, Hugh Grant and Hugh Jackman. Can Rebecca still be starstruck? Well, she became that, for example, during the filming of Dune: Part two, when an important role was played by the legendary Christopher Walken.

-I sat on my throne, with a cloth over my face, and did not dare to make eye contact with him. How could I dare speak to him? Then someone said he knows a lot about Marlon Brando, so when I got the chance I asked him to tell me about Brando - and he did.

Rebecca's career has long gone straight up. How does she herself view the successes?

- There are people out there who drive around with scripts and go to castings and never get any roles and who are probably better than I am. I don't mean that I'm bad, I work very hard at what I do.

- But I have never seen a future, I have never predicted that it would be a success. I haven't had sharp elbows to make it in Hollywood. I've wanted to do what I'm doing now for a long time, and it feels like such a damn luxury.