Julia Roberts was going to appear in the last installment of the franchise, but there was a reason why her participation was ruled out.
Mission Impossible 7 surprised everyone with its plot and an outstanding cast that was highly praised by critics. However, there is a secret unknown to many: Director Christopher McQuarrie was about to contact Julia Roberts to play the role of Marie, the woman whose death apparently incriminates Ethan, played by Tom Cruise.
In the film, the protagonist faces a threat known as The Entity, an artificial intelligence, and his human emissary, Gabriel (Esai Morales). To establish the past between these characters, Mission Impossible 7 includes several flashbacks of the villain shooting an enigmatic woman named Marie, who was ultimately brought to life by actress Mariela Garriga. Originally Julia Roberts had been considered for the role.
As revealed by Christopher McQuarrie, the flashbacks for Mission Impossible 7 had a more complex initial conception, as they contemplated showing Roberts looking considerably younger to play the role of Marie. To reach this conclusion, the director considered which actress Tony Scott, who directed the previous installment of the franchise, would have chosen.
"If you hire Esai Morales and Tom Cruise and take away their age, and then hire a 23-year-old woman to be his confidant in Berlin in 1989, that's bollocks."
So we thought about it and said 'Who is going to be Marie? Who from that time would have been Marie? I said, 'Okay, if I were doing this sequence, it would be Tom in, say, 1989. It would be Tony Scott's 'Mission Impossible'. "That's who would have been directing the movie before Brian De Palma, you know, around that time."
So McQuarrie set about studying the style of Tony Scott watching Days of Thunder to determine which rising star of that era would fit the famed franchise. "At the time, there was Mystic Pizza," McQuarrie said. "And I thought, 'Oh my gosh. Julia Roberts, a pre-Pretty Woman version of Julia Roberts would be perfect for this youthful role."
The next step was to convince Julia Roberts to join the franchise and use special effects to make her look younger, similar to how she looked in the 1990s. "Then as she was considering it conceptually, I thought, 'Now we just have to make everyone look younger with rejuvenation technology: Julia Roberts, Esai, Tom, and Henry Czerny.'"
However, as McQuarrie weighed all the options, he also considered the costs of having an actress as well known as Roberts and also using expensive technology for the rejuvenation process. Ultimately, he came to the conclusion that, for a relatively short scene, it was not worth exceeding the film's budget.
“And then I got the bill for reducing the aging of those people before their salaries were taken into account. And if you put two of them together, or three of them together, it would have been as expensive as the finished train scene."
Rather than invest time and resources in applying rejuvenation technology to all the actors involved, the film opted to keep the flashback sequence simple, avoiding showing the faces of Cruise and Morales.
The director mentioned that the way they filmed these scenes was very interesting, highlighting the fluidity and movement of the camera. He explained that this style would not be in keeping with a movie set in 1989 unless they were shooting a Mission Impossible set in 2023.
While it would have been fascinating to have Julia Roberts involved, it's possible that bringing in the actress to rejuvenate all of her scenes with CGI would have been somewhat at variance with the film's core message, that runaway AI is more of a threat than an ally.
