The Mission: Impossible star first opened up about the unnamed actor a year ago, when she admitted that she walked off set before confronting the person and demanding that she would only act to the back of their head from that point forward.
Rebecca Ferguson is doubling down on claims she’d previously made that one co-star left her in tears after they “screamed” at her while on set.
“This person would literally look at me and say, ‘You call yourself an actor?,'” the Mission: Impossible star recalled in a new interview with UK’s The Sunday Times. She told the newspaper that she came back the next day and confronted the actor, demanding they leave the set.
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“I remember being so scared. And I looked at this person and said, ‘You can eff off. I’m going to work toward a tennis ball. I never want to see you again,'” the Dune star shared. When asked if she’s been in touch with this person since her initial comments in February 2024, Ferguson said she hasn’t.
As for whether she thinks they know she was talking about them, she said she actually doesn’t care — and she knows she’s not the only one who’s “had a s–tty time” working with this individual.
At the same time, Ferguson admits that she’s not necessarily blameless in what she said was a complex situation, per the outlet. “I will shove someone under a bus in front of an entire crew to make a point. I don’t applaud my own behavior in that,” she admitted.
“It’s a really tricky world. We put a lot of blame on bullies and when we get older we can understand that people are insecure,” she added. “When you start standing up for yourself, it’s really tricky. They’ll fire you and give the job to someone else.”
While she’s never revealed who the individual was in that story, Ferguson has confirmed that it was not co-stars Tom Cruise, Hugh Jackman, or Ryan Reynolds. It was, however, someone who was “number one on the call sheet,” meaning they were the top-billed star on the film they were making together.
Calling the person an “absolute idiot of a co-star” on the Reign with Josh Smith podcast in 2024, Ferguson, she recalled at the time, “I remember there was a moment and this human being was being so insecure and angry because this person couldn’t get the scenes out.”
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“And I think I was so vulnerable and uncomfortable that I got screamed at,” continued. “But because this person was number one on a call sheet, there was no safety net for me. So no one had my back. And I would cry walking off set.”
She also mentioned being asked, “You call yourself an actor?” and said that the unnamed star said of her, “This is what I have to work with?” She remembered, “I stood there just breaking.”
In February, when she spoke about standing up for herself, she said she was told that the producers told her, “You can’t do this to number one. We have to let this person be on set.” And so, she said she requested that she act to the back of their head, adding, “And so I did.”
“I thought it shouldn’t have to be that way And I remember going to the director afterward and saying, ‘What is happening?'” Ferguson said then. “The director said, ‘You’re right. I am not taking care of everyone else. I’m trying to fluff this person because it’s so unstable.’ And it was great from that moment but it took so long for me to get to that.”
Talking about her work on the Apple TV+ series Silo, where she’s number one on the call sheet as the series star, as well as an executive producer, Ferguson called it the happiest set she’s ever been on, telling the Times she has “zero tolerance for sh–ty, selfish behavior.”
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That’s carried through the projects she’s taken part in, which includes her current work filming the third film in the Dune series, as well as her long-running tenure alongside the aforementioned Cruise in the Mission: Impossible set.
While she made it clear that Cruise was not the star who yelled at her, she did called him “a man-child” in her Times interview, though she qualified that she means that “in a good way.”
She explained, “I often joke that there’s someone with a tranquillizer gun and a net looking for him. It’s frustrating because you’re ready to shoot and the sun’s going down. Tom goes, ‘What are we waiting for?’ and I go, ‘You!’ And he laughs and goes, ‘F***, I’m sorry.'”
Her next project is A House of Dynamite, where she shares the screen with Idris Elba. The political drama directed by Kathryn Bigelow features Elba as the president faced with the shocking revelation that a nuclear missile is heading to Chicago, and how to respod. Ferguson portrays a military captain involved with efforts to shoot it down.
The Netflix film is in theaters now and hits the streamer October 24.
