Hannah Waddingham Talks Landing On A Fighter Carrier With Tom Cruise And Chris McQuarrie For M:I 8, And She's Giving Me All The Top Gun Vibes

The characters in Mission: Impossible movies are always flying off to exotic locations and doing incredible things. It looks like quite an amazing life to be a character in the franchise, but it sounds like it’s equally incredible to be an actor playing those characters. Hannah Waddingham has spoken about the experience of spending several days on an aircraft carrier, and while she could be talking about making a Top Gun movie with Tom Cruise as easily as making a Mission: Impossible movie, it sounds pretty wild either way.

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two details are few and far between, but we know that Hannah Waddingham is part of the Mission: Impossible 8 cast in an unknown role. ET caught up with the actress whle promoting The Garfield Movie (which opens on Friday), and she was asked about her role in the film. While she obviously couldn’t say much specifically, she called the experience “gorgeous and inspirational” as she spent nearly a week on board an aircraft carrier and living among members of the U.S. Navy. She said…

Gorgeous and inspirational. Yes. Spending five days on the George H.W. Bush active fighter carrier, we landed, we were in an Osprey, landed on a moving vessel with 4 and a half thousand naval men and women on it and spent five days super low-key, like scrubbed, basic, eating breakfast, lunch and dinner together and I can't tell you how inspired I came away by Tom and by Chris McQuarrie.

Since we know that Top Gun 3 is a movie in active development, maybe somebody should write a role for Hannah Waddingham. She clearly loved her time on board an aircraft carrier and one assumes that at least some of the next Top Gun movie will require the cast to be on board one as well. Waddingham has also sung the praises of working with Tom Cruise, so she'd almost certainly be up for it again. 

We had previously been told that Mission: Impossible was set to borrow a page from Top Gun and do some significant filming on board the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier. In March of last year, it was reported Cruise had traveled to the ship, though what exactly happened there or how the scenes would fit into the larger story of Dead Reckoning were unclear.

At the time we hadn’t even seen Dead Reckoning Part One so we had no idea how the scene on the aircraft carrier would work., Now we at least have some ideas. The Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One ending gave us Ethan Hunt on the quest for a rogue AI, which was sitting at the bottom of an ocean. The aircraft carrier could be a stop on the way to try and get to it, once the team learns where it is.  

With Dead Reckoning Part Two still a year away, it will still be some time before we get a chance to see how this story ends, but the cast is certainly getting us excited. 

Dirk Libbey
Content Producer/Theme Park Beat

CinemaBlend’s resident theme park junkie and amateur Disney historian, Dirk began writing for CinemaBlend as a freelancer in 2015 before joining the site full-time in 2018. He has previously held positions as a Staff Writer and Games Editor, but has more recently transformed his true passion into his job as the head of the site's Theme Park section. He has previously done freelance work for various gaming and technology sites. Prior to starting his second career as a writer he worked for 12 years in sales for various companies within the consumer electronics industry. He has a degree in political science from the University of California, Davis.  Is an armchair Imagineer, Epcot Stan, Future Club 33 Member.