Mission: Impossible 7 nearly included a digitally de-aged Julia Roberts

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One director Christopher McQuarrie has revealed that the movie nearly included a digitally de-aged Julia Roberts.

Earlier this month, it emerged that a sequence involving a digitally de-aged Tom Cruise set in the late 1980s was considered for the movie's opening scenes, though they ended up deciding against it.

Now more details about the plans have emerged, McQuarrie revealing on Empire's Spoiler Special podcast that Roberts was considered to play Ethan Hunt's lover in the scene – especially given she was a rising star during the time period it is set in.

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"I said, 'OK, if I were doing this sequence, it would be Tom in, say, 1989. It would be Tony Scott's Mission: Impossible," he said. "That's who would have been directing the movie before Brian De Palma, you know, in that era.

"We looked at Days of Thunder and we looked at the style of it, and we started thinking what would it 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 breakout star in 1989? And right around then was Mystic Pizza.

"And I was like, 'Oh my God. Julia Roberts, a then-pre-Pretty Woman Julia Roberts, as this young woman.'"

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McQuarrie then admitted that the only way he "could have seen doing the sequence justice [using de-ageing] was to somehow convince Julia Roberts to come in and be this small role at the beginning of this story".

"And of course, as you're conceptually going through it, you're like, 'Now all anybody's going to be doing is thinking about the de-ageing of Julia Roberts, and Esai [Morales] and Tom, and Henry Czerny'," he added.

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The director went on to explain that the potential of viewers being "too distracted", as well as the high cost, both played a part in the decision to scrap the plans, recalling: "I got the bill for de-ageing those people before their salaries were even factored into it.

"And if you put two of them in a shot together, or three of them in a shot together, it would have been as expensive as the train by the time we were done. It was so… the force multiplier of – and the way we shoot scenes, and the fluidity, and the camera movement.

"And of course, that wouldn't be the style of the movie in 1989. That wouldn't make sense if you were shooting an '89 Mission like a 2023 Mission."

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is out now in UK and US cinemas.