Actress Thandie Newton “feared Tom Cruise” when she worked with him on the set of Mission: Impossible II , she told New York Magazine on Monday . Cruise is, according to Newton, “a very dominant person”.
The actor, according to Newton, who played Nyah Hall opposite Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt, “would do his very best to look nice,” but couldn’t deal with stress and pressure. “He takes on a lot and I think he feels that only he can do everything as well as possible.”
“There was once when we did a night scene with him and me on the balcony,” she recalls. “And I don’t think it was a very well-written scene. I got mad at him. We were frustrated with each other, it didn’t go well … Tom wasn’t happy with what I was doing because I had the worst text.”
According to the actress, Cruise became “so frustrated” that he wanted to stage the scene and the two switched roles. “So we filmed the whole scene with me like him – because, believe me, I knew his lyrics by then – and he played me.” This did not help Newton. “It pushed me further into a place of fear and uncertainty,” said Newton.
“He wasn’t terrible,” Newton said of Cruise. “It was just – he was really stressed.”