Julia Roberts was considered for aging in the "Mission Impossible" segment

Director Christopher McQuarrie previously revealed that a flashback segment that would have aged Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One was briefly reviewed.

Now McQuarrie says the same segment - set in 1989 - also considered offering Julia Roberts a small role as an aged version of herself.

Speaking during the Empire Spoiler Special podcast episode, McQuarrie said Roberts is being considered like agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) in love. But the footage was scrapped altogether, McQuarrie said, because he felt audiences would feel "too distracted by how an actor I had known for so long was now suddenly this young".

Mariela Garriga eventually played the part in the flashback. The film features brief glimpses into Ethan Hunt's life before he joined the IMF.

"I said, 'OK, if I did this sequence it would be Tom in it, say , 1989. It would be Tony Scott's 'Mission: Impossible.' That's who would have directed the movie before Brian De Palma, you know, at that time," McQuarrie said on the podcast. "We watched Days of Thunder and we looked at the style of it, and we started thinking what it would look like if Tony Scott had shot this, and who would it have been? I looked back at who was the ingenue, who was the star in 1989? And right then there was Mystic Pizza. And I was like, 'Oh my God Julia Roberts, then pre-Pretty Woman Julia Roberts, as this young woman.'”

He continued, "The only way I could have seen doing the sequence justice [in using aging] was to convince Julia Roberts to come in and be that small role at the start of this story. And of course, as you go through it conceptually, you're like, 'Now, everything everybody's gonna do is think about the aging of Julia Roberts, and Esai (Morales) and Tom, and Henry Czerny.' ”

Costs also played into the decision.

"I got the bill for aging these people before their salaries even got there And if you put two of them in a shot together, or three of them in a shot together, it would have cost as much as the train by the time we were done. It was so... the force multiplier of – and the way we shoot the scenes, the fluidity and the movement of the camera. And of course, that wouldn't be the style of the film in 1989. It wouldn't make sense if you were shooting a " Mission" of 89 as a "Mission" of 2023. "

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