Here’s how Mission: Impossible – Fallout’s bruising bathroom fight scene was created. Mission: Impossible is a famous spy series from the 1960s revolving around the titular missions assigned to spy agency The IMF. The show ran from 1966 to 1973, with the cast featuring Peter Graves, Martin Landau, Leonard Nimoy and Barbara Bain. The eventual Mission: Impossible movie from 1996 was Tom Cruise’s first film as both star and producer, with Brian De Palma taking the helm.
The first Mission: Impossible was a major success, and established a reliable franchise for Cruise. To keep each installment fresh, it was decided to hire a different director for every sequel to give them all a unique stamp. John Woo directed Mission: Impossible II, J.J. Abrams made his feature film directing debut with part 3 while Brad Bird helmed 2011’s Ghost Protocol. Cruise’s longtime collaborator Christopher McQuarrie tackled Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, and in breaking with tradition, came back for 2018’s Fallout too.
This proved to be a smart move, with Mission: Impossible – Fallout becoming the highest-grossing outing to date, in addition to receiving glowing reviews. It added lots of new faces to the series, with Henry Cavill’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout character Walker becoming famous for the instant “Henry Cavill Arm Reload” meme. Fallout is stacked with great setpieces, with this particular moment happening during an apocalyptically brutal bathroom brawl between Cruise’s Hunt, Cavill’s CIA assassin Walker and a decoy for mystery villain John Lark, played by stuntman Liang Yang.
Christoper McQuarrie considered some stunt casting for this decoy Lark, which included names like Michael Fassbender. He decided against that as he needed somebody who could pull off some incredibly physical stunts and credibly beat up both Cavill and Cruise. In a chat with Collider, Cavill revealed he trained with Eastwood Action Stunts for this Mission: Impossible – Fallout brawl, with both he and Cruise training with Liang Yang and practicing their respective moves until they became muscle memory.
The sequence itself was shot over four weeks, and from a storytelling perspective, McQuarrie wanted each character to have a different fighting style that reflected their persona. Walker is called a “hammer” earlier in the movie and prefers blunt force while the decoy Lark is a Wushu expert, which he uses to get the upper hand throughout the Mission: Impossible – Fallout bathroom fight. The scene also establishes that while Walker is tough, he can be bested, which comes into play in the final showdown between him and Hunt. The director also set the fight in a pristine, clean white room to make it unsettling, as it gave the characters nowhere to hide. Cavill admitted both he and Cruise took a fierce beating during filming and eventually confessed to one another how much pain they were in when it ended.
Sections of the bathroom set were at least covered in a softer material to make the impacts less severe. For Henry Cavill, the most stressful moment of the Mission: Impossible – Falloutbathroom brawl was tossing Liang through the mirror because he had to be extremely precise and if he messed up, it would be at least an hour to reset and try again. The scene ends with Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa shooting the decoy Lark in the face, but McQuarrie was able to avoid making this gory with a clever cheat. This moment features Hunt and fake Lark wrestling over a pistol with the camera throwing focus to the gun, so when Lark is shot he’s out of focus, though his face is seen distorting from the impact.
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