Simon Pegg's Most Chilling Mission: Impossible Moment Was Done All From His Phone
The following contains spoilers for "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One."
Simon Pegg's Benji has become an integral part of the "Mission: Impossible" team. First introduced in "Mission: Impossible III" as a comic relief tech guy (in a role originally intended for Ricky Gervais), Benji has since gone on to become a field agent and accompany Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and the gang on their various missions, should they choose to accept them. The latest is "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One," an action extravaganza that sees Ethan and company dealing with The Entity, a bit of self-aware A.I. that has the power to do, well, seemingly everything and anything, including impersonating other human beings.
One such moment arises midway through the film, with Ethan and the team growing confused at a voice giving them directions and instructions during a chase. The voice sounds like it belongs to Benji, but it doesn't. This is a bit of craftiness on the part of the Entity since Benji is known to offer guidance during chases — he did that very thing in "Mission: Impossible – Fallout." But when the Entity is all around you, you can't even trust your own ears.
'It just chills me to the bone every time I watch it'
/Film's Jeremy Mathai spoke with Simon Pegg about "Dead Reckoning," and asked about the scene where the Entity impersonates Benji's voice, fooling Ethan and the rest of the team. "What kind of direction did you get from Chris [McQuarrie] about exactly how to deliver those lines ... ?" was the question. Pegg first revealed that "a lot of the stuff" used in the film was done directly via Pegg's phone. "We were talking about it, I was at home, McQ was in the edit, and he's saying, 'Oh, we want to get this,'" Pegg said. "And so we started delivering the lines. I went to the edit and did some more ADR. But I think, in the end, we used what I did on my phone because it felt like the best-pitched version of it. Because ... it could have gone like HAL in '2001 or it could have gone a little bit silly."
And what about the kind of voice Pegg uses? To be clear, it sounds like Pegg's actual voice, just slightly ... robotic. And, well, creepy. As Pegg puts it:
"But the idea was, it's just this thing recorded Benji's voice when he was talking to the bomb and can now just become him. And the fact that the Entity possesses one of Ethan's most trusted friends, it's like a f***ing horror movie at that moment. It just chills me to the bone every time I watch it. And you just hear it making Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson) go to the bridge. It's giving me goosebumps talking about it."
It is a genuinely unsettling moment, all the more so for the chaos it causes. And the implications are clear and disturbing: the Entity can be anyone. Anyone at all.
"Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One" is now in theaters.