Julia Roberts Was Almost De-Aged For ‘Mission: Impossible 7’ Alongside Tom Cruise

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One almost featured not only one, but two movie stars de-aged by VFX (usually done with AI tech and other CGI tools).

Director Christopher McQuarrie recently told Variety that he was considering de-aging Mission: Impossible lead Tom Cruise for the seventh installment's opening sequence, which was going to be set in 1989 and would have had Cruise looking even younger than he did in the first M:I film (which was released in 1996). McQuarrie ultimately nixed the idea, admitting that he didn't feel the technology was quite there yet and that the sight of such a young Cruise would be "distracting."

However, McQuarrie further revealed in the new episode of /Film's audio show The Empire Spoiler Special Film Podcast that he was also ready to de-age Julia Roberts for the opening scene, but that never came to fruition either.

"We looked at Days of Thunder and we looked at the style of it, and we started thinking what would it look like if Tony Scott had shot this, and who would it have been? I looked back at who was the ingenue, who was the breakout star in 1989? And right around then was Mystic Pizza. And I was like, 'Oh my God. Julia Roberts, a then-pre-Pretty Woman Julia Roberts, as this young woman," McQuarrie shared.

"The only way I could have seen doing the sequence justice [using de-aging] was to somehow convince Julia Roberts to come in and be this small role at the beginning of this story. And of course, as you're conceptually going through it, you're like, 'Now all anybody's going to be doing is thinking about the de-aging of Julia Roberts, and Esai, and Tom, and Henry Czerny,'" the director added.

And it wasn't just the "distracting" factor that made McQuarrie cut the idea, but also the exorbitant price tag, which he balked at and claimed in the podcast would have been as expensive as the film's epic train stunt scene.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is now playing in theaters.