Mission: Impossible — Fallout's Bathroom Scene Took An 'Uncomfortably Long' Time To Film
Henry Cavill spent an "uncomfortably long" time in the bathroom while filming "Mission: Impossible – Fallout." If you've seen the movie, then you'll know Cavill's character, August Walker, wasn't on the toilet, waiting to die like John Travolta's hitman in "Pulp Fiction." (It's a thing.)
Part of the time, Walker is in a stall with two other men, one of them being Ethan Hunt, played by Travolta's fellow Scientologist, Tom Cruise. However, contrary to what the rowdy Parisians who come knocking on their door think, Walker and Hunt and their unconscious captive are there for face-scanning purposes and not a romantic rendezvous.
In a 2017 Instagram post, the summer before "Fallout" hit theaters, Cavill highlighted the skills of Chinese stuntman and Wu Shu champion Liang Yang, who plays said captive, the decoy of John Lark.
Yang's character isn't captive for very long, as he soon regains consciousness and proceeds to beat the living crap (no bathroom pun intended this time) out of Walker and Hunt in a two-on-one fight.
The fight is right up there with Jet Li vs. Danny Glover and Mel Gibson in "Lethal Weapon 4," and when you think about the fact that Yang is knocking around Superman himself (Cavill) and superstar Tom Cruise, he's clearly a good spokesman for the services of Eastwood Action Stunts, which handled the stunt coordination in the bathroom fight in "Fallout." In a 2018 interview with Collider, Cavill explained:
"Wade Eastwood and his team (Eastwood Action Stunts) put the fight together over the course of shooting early in the movie. Tom and I had slightly different schedules so we worked with each other's respective doubles for training purposes and then with Liang Yang directly as well."
'The bathroom fight took 4 weeks to shoot'
The bathroom fight in "Mission: Impossible – Fallout" lasts almost four minutes, and in the end, Ethan Hunt only wins because Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) shows up to shoot the John Lark decoy in the head (and round out the ensuing Tarantino-esque, low-angle three-shot). Knowing that August Walker is the real Lark recontextualizes the moment where Walker takes the time to remove his jacket, as the Lark decoy presses a sharp pipe to Hunt's neck.
Walker is in no hurry to save Hunt, and it seems writer-director Christopher McQuarrie and the makers of "Fallout" were in no big hurry to yell cut on the bathroom fight, either. Cavill revealed that the four-minute scene took four weeks to film, and this is what had him referring to it as an "uncomfortably long" shoot:
"We trained and got the fight choreography and the various stunts drilled into our muscle memory during any moments that we could get away from the shooting schedule. Overall the bathroom fight took four weeks to shoot, which, for a scene as intense as that, definitely felt uncomfortably long."
The amazing stunt performances that Cavill, Cruise, Yang, and company squeezed out in the bathroom (sorry not sorry) in "Mission: Impossible – Fallout" helped give the franchise one of its best action scenes, right up there with the bullet train scene in the first "Mission: Impossible" movie. Next time you're in a public restroom stall, reading dirty limericks on the wall, just remember that entire movies have been shot in four weeks or less. According to FandomWire, that includes classics like "Rocky," "Halloween," and "The Blair Witch Project." The fact that "Fallout" spent four weeks getting one scene right just shows how dedicated the filmmakers were.
"Mission: Impossible – Fallout" is currently streaming on Paramount+.