Simon Pegg has called Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning "the biggest mission yet", describing sequences filmed on the Arctic island of Svalbard as "extraordinary".
"It's the biggest mission yet. The stuff that we did in it, particularly Tom, is just kind of mind-boggling," Pegg told Patrick Kielty on RTÉ One's Late Late Show.
The BAFTA-winner said that filming in temperatures of minus 40 °C brought many hazards. "We were filming on a frozen sea, so the only thing stopping us from drowning in ice-cold water was… more frozen water in a solid kind of mass," he explained.
Pegg also revealed that wildlife intrusions were the norm during filming. "We literally had to stop shooting three times to allow polar bears to walk through the set," he said, adding with a laugh, "Even Tom Cruise can’t stop polar bears from doing their business."
Speaking about the authenticity of the stunts in the Mission: Impossible movies, Pegg said: "For real... there’s no AI. This is you on location - you can’t fake it."
The actor, who plays gadget specialist Benji Dunn, said his role has evolved since he first joined the blockbuster franchise twenty years ago. "Benji’s sort of a hacker… he’s become more action, though. In this one, I do get to do some pretty cool stuff, and there was a lot of danger... I don’t want to give too much away."
Pegg also recalled watching Cruise perform a high-altitude stunt. He said: "We were all up there watching that… you’d see him disappear and then there’s just a big pause and you wait to hear 'good canopy’, which meant his chute had opened. Thankfully, and then you could relax.
"You very rarely see him nervous, but he was nervous that day."
Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning is due for release on 14 July.
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