#mi7 interview

What I love about that is Ethan always listens when he does that, when Benji shout, Ethan goes quiet and starts thinking, is just a lovely dynamic to get to play that with Tom. ღღღ

Rebecca Ferguson shakes my hand looking every inch the Hollywood player in a killer white trouser suit and platform boots. Then she removes the boots, pads across the London hotel suite and perches cross-legged on a sofa, cuddling a cushion. Done for effect? Maybe, but it is a neat demonstration of what has made the Swede one of the most bankable actresses in the world: the ability to project a bullet-proof sense of purpose — and then dismantle it.

Ferguson, 41, specialises in tough, capable women. She broke through in 2013 as Elizabeth Woodville, wife of the Yorkist Edward IV, in the BBC’s The White Queen and became a global star as the agent Ilsa Faust in three Mission: Impossible films. Then came Lady Jessica, imperious mother of Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides, in the Dune films, and Juliette Nichols, an engineer in an underground post-apocalyptic community in Apple TV+’s Silo. Yet what makes those characters so watchable are the moments when the armour slips: when Ilsa exchanges a meaningful glance with Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, when Jessica drinks the poisonous water of life or a terrified Juliette dangles over a subterranean lake.

That makes her a spot-on choice to play the boss of the White House Situation Room in A House of Dynamite, a tale of the hyper-competent creaking under the greatest pressure. Another taut geopolitical thriller from Kathryn Bigelow, the director of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, the film imagines the 18 minutes between the identification of a nuclear missile heading towards Chicago and, well, what comes next. It replays the action from different perspectives, focusing in turn on the soldiers tasked with shooting down the missile, Idris Elba’s unnamed president, who has to decide whether to retaliate, and, first, Ferguson’s uber-focused Captain Olivia Walker.

On hand throughout the shoot was Larry Pfeiffer, the former senior director of the Situation Room under Barack Obama, who told Ferguson that the cardinal rule was “you never lose your shit in the Situation Room”. If you can’t keep your cool, “You go out, you cry, you swear, you come back and you sit down very calmly,” she says in fluent, slightly accented English.

In one scene Walker leaves the room to call her husband and warn him of the impending apocalypse. “Kathryn was like, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know how I’m going to react when I make this phone call.’ She was like, ‘That’s amazing. Let’s put a camera in there with her.’” What makes the scene is the way that Walker composes herself afterwards and switches back to work mode. That sense of resilience with chinks of emotion is Ferguson to a T.

When we meet Walker she is saying goodbye to her young son, who gives her his toy dinosaur to take to work. That was Ferguson’s idea. Sage, her seven-year-old daughter with her husband, the British businessman Rory St Clair Gainer, “left to go to school and she went, ‘Oh, can you take Samsonite?’ Samsonite’s our little toy rabbit.” The dinosaur became a motif in the film. “Someone said, ‘Did you think about the symbolism of extinction?’ and I went, ‘No, f***ing hell.’”no.

A House of Dynamite is reminiscent of The West Wing in its depiction of impressive people behaving admirably but that’s not the White House we see on the news these days. “No, it’s not,” Ferguson says, raising an eyebrow. The film was written by Noah Oppenheim, who also wrote Zero Day, about a cyberattack on America. Like that Netflix series, A House of Dynamite does not specify which party its president belongs to — wise in these inflamed times.

“In the Situation Room they are not allowed opinions,” Ferguson says. “Their job is to be the highest form of switchboard. They know who the president needs to speak to at a certain point, a vice-president or the head of Russia or China.” The film is “not about criticising who’s in charge — it’s questioning the fact that we have such a stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world and we don’t talk about it. Nine countries have active nuclear weapons but only three are part of Nato. What does that mean? What does it mean that one human being can start a nuclear war?”

Ferguson was born in Stockholm to a Swedish businessman and a bohemian English mother who helped translate the lyrics of Abba’s Waterloo album into English and appeared on the cover of their 1975 follow-up, Abba. Ferguson also has an 18-year-old son, Isac, from a previous relationship and lives in Richmond, southwest London, partly to be near Heathrow so she can visit him in Sweden.

While much of her career has been spent “playing second fiddle to really good male actors”, on Silo she is the undisputed lead, as well as an executive producer. “I was literally googling, ‘What is an executive producer for a TV show?’” It’s the happiest set she has been on, she says, adding pointedly that she now has “zero tolerance for shitty, selfish behaviour”.

Last year she told the Reign with Josh Smith podcast about working with an “absolute idiot of a co-star” whose anger reduced her to tears. “This person would literally look at me and say, ‘You call yourself an actor?’” she said. The next day she demanded they leave the set. “I remember being so scared. And I looked at this person and said, ‘You can eff off. I’m going to work toward a tennis ball. I never want to see you again.’”

Ferguson has confirmed that the bully was neither Tom Cruise nor Hugh Jackman, her co-star in The Greatest Showman, nor Ryan Reynolds, with whom she worked on the sci-fi movie Life. The person has not been in touch, she says. Does she think they know she was talking about them?

“I don’t care,” she says, while noting that “other people who have worked with this person also had a shitty time”. It was a complex situation in which she was not blameless, she says. “I will shove someone under a bus in front of an entire crew to make a point. I don’t applaud my own behaviour in that. It’s a really tricky world. We put a lot of blame on bullies and when we get older we can understand that people are insecure. When you start standing up for yourself, it’s really tricky. They’ll fire you and give the job to someone else.”

It doesn’t seem to have harmed Ferguson’s career. She is in the middle of shooting Dune: Part Three, whose script is “phenomenal”, she says. Dune is “one of those universes that come once in a blue moon — like the original Star Wars. It’s because Denis [Villeneuve, the director] had this dream since he was a little boy. He f***ing loved Dune.”

Villeneuve is also directing the next Bond movie, to be written by Steven Knight, who penned another of Ferguson’s upcoming projects, the Peaky Blinders spin-off film The Immortal Man. Was she on set with Knight when his participation in Bond was confirmed? “No — I would have been pushing to play the baddie,” she says. “We haven’t had a female Bond villain.” This is not quite true — Sophie Marceau in The World Is Not Enough springs to mind — but we could do with more. “I already said that to Denis — ‘female Bond villain, bitch!’ He was like, ‘Oh là là.’”

Ferguson won’t be in the next Bond film, she insists, and she is as in the dark as everyone else about it. As a former wing woman of Ethan Hunt, does she see 007 as the enemy? “I love the Bonds, most of them, but I often found that they weren’t very good at writing for women.” She has no worries about Knight on that front. “He wrote Maria [the Maria Callas biopic] for Angelina Jolie — he’s written loads of good female roles.”

One massive and demanding spy franchise is probably enough — Mission: Impossible sounds full on. “You don’t have scripts and have no idea where it’s going to go, which is annoying and tedious and glorious,” she says. “You train for a stunt scene for months and all of a sudden they cut it.” Cruise is “a man-child in a good way. I often joke that there’s someone with a tranquilliser gun and a net looking for him. It’s frustrating because you’re ready to shoot and the sun’s going down. Tom goes, ‘What are we waiting for?’ and I go, ‘You!’ And he laughs and goes, ‘F***, I’m sorry.’”

Ferguson goes quiet when I ask about Ilsa being killed off in Dead Reckoning: Part One. Playing her was “a joy”, she says, “but that dilutes a bit because more characters keep coming in, or [Ilsa] becomes more of a team player”. She and the director Christopher McQuarrie “had the same idea” that “there was nothing more to do” with the character. It feels like she wants to say something else but she thinks better of it.

Still, the Mission contract meant that there were “a lot of jobs I couldn’t do” and she’s making up for that now. There is the Peaky Blinders film, in which she plays a Romanian gypsy (“I did it because I really wanted to work with Cillian Murphy”), and an adaptation of Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree, in which she plays the villain, Dame Snap, opposite Claire Foy, Lenny Henry and Jennifer Saunders. And if the Bond people are short of an evil megalomaniac, they know where to look.