Spotlight on: Rebecca Ferguson
The thirty-one-year-old Swedish actress, best known for her Golden Globe-nominated performance as Queen Elizabeth in the television miniseries The White Queen, stars alongside Tom Cruise in the fifth installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise.
Ferguson, who was 12 when the first film was released, received the news that Cruise wanted to meet with her whilst perched atop a camel in Morocco, where she was filming the two-part television drama The Red Tent. Seventeen hours later, she was in London meeting director Christopher McQuarrie and Cruise, on whom she'd had a childhood crush. Her instant rapport with Cruise secured her the female lead as British intelligence agent Ilsa Faust, whose motives are always in question. Ferguson is already receiving positive reviews for her performance, with The Hollywood Reporter crediting her "grown-up poise [which] recalls that of some 1940s movie stars."
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation may increase her recognition, but Ferguson is no newcomer. Born to an English mother and Swedish father, the Stockholm-raised beauty started her career at the age of 15, playing the role of Anna Gripenhielm in the soap opera Nya tider. "You can judge soaps as much as you want," Ferguson, who followed up her two-and-a-half year stint on Nya tider with a role in another soap opera, Ocean Ave., "but there is no better school for learning lines, technique, and jumping into character."
Her first feature film role was a result of happenstance. Swedish director Richard Hobert gave her the lead role in 2011's A One-Way Trip to Antibes, which did well enough outside of Sweden to land her a London agent. Two years later, she found herself being directed by Ridley Scott for television's The Vatican. Her real breakthrough came that same year with her starring role in the ten-part historical drama, The White Queen. Her performance as Queen Elizabeth was both steely and incandescent, traits that could also be applied to her Mission: Impossible character.
The former dancer and trained scuba driver did most of her own stunts, training six hours a day for six days a week before filming began. The mother-of-one further endeared herself to her thrill-seeking co-star with her love of motor racing and by joining Cruise as he took a vintage racing Ferrari, on set to be used for a chase scene, out for a spin.
Currently living in a small seaside town in Sweden with her partner Ludwig and eight-year-old son, Ferguson will next be seen headlining the spy thriller Despite the Falling Snow and co-starring with Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant in director Stephen Frears' Florence Foster Jenkins.
Watch the Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation trailer below
