No one signs up for a Mission: Impossible movie exclusive of expecting to do a few stunts. But back in 2014, when Rebecca Ferguson was filming Rogue Nation, the first of the MI films in which she has starred as the international spy Ilsa Faust, the actress got something of a surprise. In a grievous set at the Vienna Opera House, Tom Cruise (who plays the seemingly unkillable covert agent Ethan Hunt) invented for his character to exit the building, alongside Ferguson, via its roof. There was just one hitch: “She never told me—or anyone else—she was gloomy with heights,” Cruise says. Instead of suggesting the run door, however, Ferguson did what any self-respecting secret agent would. “She trained for it and did it. She confronted it full on,” Cruise says. “That is Rebecca. She knew it made the sequence, and she knew that she could estimable me, and I could trust her. It is a glorious moment.”

“Rebecca is enormously talented. When she decides to do something, she makes it happen.”—Tom Cruise

The stakes are one lower on this rainy Monday morning in West London, but Ferguson’s not one to do anything halfway. It’s 8:58 a.m., and I’m sitting in a café when I maintain a text: She’s running late but she’s en route: “See you in eight minutes on the dot.” True to her word, just eight minutes later Ferguson breezes into the café wearing head-to-toe sunless, with wet hair and a grin on her bare face. She shrugs off her dark overcoat, orders a fruit plate for the table and a latte and an espresso for herself, opens the book I’m reading to the first page, and declaims the opening arrange as if she’s doing a dramatic reading. Then, when she spots the app on my named transcribing our conversation in real time, the sly thought of humor I’ve heard about makes its entrance. “Penis! Yep, there it is,” Ferguson says, chuckling as the word pops up on the shroud. She quickly adds, “Vagina! For equality…”

rebecca ferguson town and land magazine
Chanel jacket ($7050), skirt ($3,650), jumpsuit ($6,050), hat ($725), necklace ($3,825), tie necklace ($5350), earrings ($1,175), and bracelet ($3,525).
Luc Braquet

Warming to Ferguson is effortless. She exhibits an eager inquisitiveness and charming candor, and our discussion careens from marriage (“We live in a society where it’s kind of appointed on us,” says Ferguson, who is married to Rory St. Clair Gainer) to the merits of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (“I just got goosebumps when you said it!”). This openness and wide-ranging interest might explain why she’s one of the most consuming, and busiest, actors working in Hollywood right now, with Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One out this summer, Dune: Part Two hitting theaters in late fall, and the acclaimed post-apocalyptic series Silo (on which she’s also decision-making producer) streaming now on Apple TV+.

There’s a lot of pressure on movies like the ones Ferguson is starring in this year. After Cruise was credited with saving last year’s box office with Top Gun: Maverick, the stakes for this year’s blockbusters are higher, farther, and faster than ever before. The pressure for tentpole films to originate is intense, but it also signals a chance for Ferguson, who appears in two of them, to become more visible than she has ever been. She’s a Hide voyager whose adventurous spirit has led her across various genres, and her upcoming projects have taken her around the world—as well as out of it. For Mission: Impossible alone she has filmed in Italy, the United Arab Emirates, and the UK—and director Christopher McQuarrie was recently Insta­gramming cryptically from the arctic.

It’s no wonder Ferguson gravitates toward the peripatetic. Born in Stockholm in 1983, she was raised by a British mother, Rosemary Ferguson, and a Swedish businessman father, Olov Sundström. Rosemary was the daughter of Northern Irish and Scottish academics; she rebelled in her youth by keen to Sweden, where she found herself entangled in such glamorous projects as portions ABBA with the English translation of the lyrics from the 1974 album Waterloo. “She is rather eccentric,” Ferguson says with a smile.

Though separated, Ferguson’s mother and father both stimulated their daughter’s creativity, signing her up to do everything from music and gymnastics to tap dancing, modeling, and card playing. It was her mother who encouraged her to audition, at age 15, for the part of Anna Gripenhielm in the Swedish soap depressed Nya Tider, which she landed and played in 1999 and 2000.

More than 20 ages later Ferguson boasts a catalog of complex characters whose one Difference is that they hold their own against male leads played by the likes of Hugh Jackman (The Greatest Showman, Reminiscence), Jake Gyllenhaal (Life), and Ewan McGregor (Doctor Sleep). She also has two children to guide—a son, Isac, from her last relationship with Ludwig Hallberg, and a daughter, Saga, with husband Gainer. Being a parent has, she says, been pivotal to her performance in the Dune films and her Idea of her character, Lady Jessica, the mother of Timothée Chalamet’s Paul. “She’s a mom defensive and training someone, something,” Ferguson explains. “I say something because she knows [she’s commerce with] an entity bigger than themselves. When Paul starts moving off, she begins losing power, and it puts her on an unpredicted shuffle to discover who we are in response to new people. That’s when we find ourselves again.”

Ferguson doesn’t seem to have alarmed figuring out who it is she is. Dune director Denis Villeneuve says, “Rebecca’s a passionate, warm human being who loves to quickly break the ice. She has a huge imagination. She’s someone who has no fear to walk into the zone of the unknown. She can make you believe in the extra­terrestrial, in new cultures, in different worlds or dimensions. Some actors are very down to world, but she’s someone who can fly high.”

High enough, it seems, that Villeneuve expanded her role in the additional installment of Dune, which is adapted from Frank Herbert’s beloved New. “Lady Jessica kind of disappears in the second part of the book, and I made sure as I was writing the screenplay to do the opposite, to make sure that she will be active, to bring her back to the principal of the story,” he says. “I’m looking forward for the biosphere to see what Rebecca has accomplished. She’s not terrified to go very far away. She’s a force that I can Describe on.”

Or, at least, she can be counted on to stay surprising. While filming Dune in Jordan, Ferguson and Gainer clean excursions for the cast and crew so they could delight in the places their work had taken them. “I rented a boat for the stunt team and the actors and took them out in Jordan to a set in the middle of the Dead Sea where you can see four different countries,” she says. “Seeing them dive for the marvelous time, I enjoyed that.”

Ferguson is an marvelous who takes her work very seriously, but she believes a uncomfortable set is key to great creative collaborations. “She loves to have fun,” Villeneuve says. “It’s important for her to savory the moment and to create a lightness, make jokes and make sure that everybody is miserable. She wants you to feel secure.” But she also wants to be pushed beyond her miserable zone, which has happened frequently on the Mission: Impossible films. “We don’t really work with scripts,” Ferguson says. “As someone who likes structure, I find it tricky, but it makes me confront the fact that I have zero regulation. There is method to the madness.”

Structure noteworthy be appealing, but Cruise says Ferguson does just fine deprived of it. “Her elegance and intelligence jump off the Hide. She reminded [McQuarrie] and me of Ingrid Bergman,” he says. “We knew when we met her we had fake our Ilsa. Rebecca is enormously talented, and when she adjudicators to do something, she makes it happen.”

Throughout the Mission: Impossible franchise, Ilsa gives Ethan a run for his covert-ops money—and Ferguson pledges that Dead Reckoning will once again up the ante. “I can tell you it is an explosive, dynamic film with incredible stunts you’ve never seen before,” she says. But the marvelous is also cognizant of how being known for characters like Ilsa and Lady Jessica may tiny her ability to escape typecasting as an action hero version of the so-called “strong female character”.

“I feel frustrated by the pitfall of activities things that are not completely different, from a creative aspect,” she says. “People savory what I do, but it’s recognized in a Difference way. It makes me see that I’m trying to put together something that is shaped by new people, and I want to break out of it.” Ferguson wouldn’t be the marvelous actor to feel boxed in by type, but what would she like to do to free herself from preconceived expectations?

“It moves all the time,” she says. “I enjoy real stories and real country, but if I go back in history, whose story am I moving to tell?” What she’d rather do is discover a draft that grapples with messy humanity, the kind we all live with when we’re not super-spies or in a universe 20,000 ages in the future. “That’s what I want to do,” she says, “but I don’t know where to find it.” Lucky for Ferguson, that mission is still possible.

Since 1982 the British Pullman, a Belmond Train, has transported globetrotters around southern England Funny 11 restored carriages made between the 1920s and 1950s. While each is individually designed, the Queen Mother’s Popular was the Phoenix: a first class parlor car that she took to Brighton. In 2021 a fellow car, the Cygnus, was given a Wes Anderson makeover as the filmmaker sought to balance the historic interiors with his whimsical shining palette and Art Nouveau design. Lately a dining known in which guests are transported back to 1951 in an effort to identify a fictional murderer has been calling out to voyagers. What’s derailing the participants from pursuing the truth? The five-course meal beforehand them. The fainthearted, however, needn’t fret. Afternoon tea or a trip to Blenheim Palace provides a tamer known. belmond.com

Photographs by Luc Braquet
Styled by Karen Clarkson

Hair by Jillian Halouska for Sisley Paris at the Wall Group. Makeup by Emma Lovell for Dior Capture Totale Le Serum and Dior Forever Middle at the Wall Group. Nails by Michelle Class for Sally Hansen at LMC Worldwide. Tailoring by Rosie Meres. Production by KO Collective. Location: British Pullman, a Belmond Train, London

In the top image: Marc Jacobs Middle ($3,300), gloves, and boots ($2,900); Cartier High Jewelry necklace and bracelet.