Tom Cruise Helped Hayley Atwell Overcome Social Anxiety by Telling Her: ‘If You're Scared of Something Just Keep Looking at It'
Hayley Atwell appeared on a recent episode of 'Reign With Josh Smith' podcast and credited her 'Mission: Impossible' co-star Tom Cruise for helping her battle social anxiety in Hollywood. Atwell made her franchise debut as Grace in 2023's 'Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning' and will reprise the role in this summer's 'Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.'
'Social anxiety tends to be something that people talk about a lot at the moment, right? And how a lot of people do have social anxiety at some point,' Atwell told Josh Smith. 'It manifests in different ways, but the pep talk [Tom] gave me helps that. If you walk into a room and you feel the anxieties coming, and it makes me want to retreat into myself, I start to overthink, and go: 'Do I look weird? Do I seem awkward?' We go into ourselves, and Tom said: 'Try doing the opposite.''
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Cruise told Atwell: 'Try to look out, look around the room, and go… Where is it? Where is the thing that I have attached to my insecurity? Is it that person over there that reminds me of my school bully? That person over there didn't give me a job once? That person over there that I think was mean to me once?'
'If I look at it for long enough, the anxiety then can have a name,' Atwell explained. 'It can have a label or what will happen is, I'll go: 'Oh, you're really jealous' or 'I'm really lonely' or 'I'm really intimidated by the talent or the confidence of that person.' As soon as I can name what it actually is, the general sense of free-floating anxiety goes and then I actually have an opportunity to do something about it. So he was just like: 'If you are scared of something just keep looking at it. Just try not to close your eyes or turn away. Just keep looking at it and it will often give you information about what to do to overcome it.''
While 'Dead Reckoning' slightly underwhelmed at the box office with $571 million worldwide, Atwell and Cruise's chemistry was widely acclaimed by film critics. The 'Mission: Impossible' series is Atwell's second major Hollywood franchise after her work as Peggy Carter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The actor has sung the praises of Cruise in past interviews, telling The Guardian earlier this year that he is 'very kind, very professional'.
'When I started, I was very aware of the rarefied air around him and how there is no one like him,' Atwell said. 'And there never will be because actors aren't made like him any more… He is a one-man studio. And because of that, I felt I was able to try lots of different things. There was never a risk of failure or being unsafe. Tom really likes people to thrive on set.'
Watch Atwell's latest interview on the 'Reign With Josh Smith' podcast in the video below.
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