We almost had to reckon with de-aged Julia Roberts in Mission: Impossible 7

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is a movie obsessed with its franchise’s past, not only through a litany of references, callbacks, and restagings of the series’ many beloved set pieces but also the history of the mysterious Ethan Hunt. For the first time, director Christopher McQuarrie looked at Ethan’s life before the Impossible Mission Force and the death of his long-lost love Marie (Mariela Garriga), who taught him that the only way to love someone is to make sure they never, ever die.

Though they considered but decided against de-aging Cruise for the scene, the conversation surrounding digitally removing the ravages of time went further than that. In a new interview with Empire (via Slashfilm), the director said they briefly considered a de-aged Julia Roberts for Ethan’s doomed lover. Thankfully, Roberts costs too much for that. Still, McQuarrie had an interesting take on why he wanted Roberts: She fits the period.

“I said, ‘Okay, if I were doing this sequence, it would be Tom in, say, 1989. It would be Tony Scott’s Mission: Impossible. That’s who would have been directing the movie before Brian De Palma, you know, in that era,” McQuarrie explained. “We looked at Days Of Thunder and we looked at the style of it, and we started thinking what would it look like if Tony Scott had shot this, and who would it have been? I looked back at who was the ingenue, who was the breakout star in 1989? And right around then was Mystic Pizza. And I was like, ’Oh my God. Julia Roberts, a then-pre-Pretty Woman Julia Roberts, as this young woman.’”

Honestly, Tony Scott’s Mission: Impossible is a more interesting thought experiment than what if Julia Roberts appeared in the thankless and voiceless role of Ethan Hunt’s fridged girlfriend. Thankfully, McQuarrie fell out of love with the idea when he started thinking about de-aging.

“The only way I could have seen doing the sequence justice [using de-aging] was to somehow convince Julia Roberts to come in and be this small role at the beginning of this story. And of course, as you’re conceptually going through it, you’re like, ‘Now all anybody’s going to be doing is thinking about the de-aging of Julia Roberts, and Esai, and Tom, and Henry Czerny.’”

There was another factor: It’s pretty costly to de-age a celebrity. He continued:

Then I got the bill for de-aging those people before their salaries were even factored into it. And if you put two of them in a shot together, or three of them in a shot together, it would have been as expensive as the train by the time we were done.

Finally, the massive salaries of the world’s biggest stars paid off, and we were spared the uncanny horror of a de-aged Julia Roberts.