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When we first met Benji, he was just an IT guy in M:I 3. Now he’s a full blown agent. Did you envision all this when you first joined the series in 2006?

Not at all. I thought it was a bit of stunt casting. And it’s cool because his arc has occurred entirely on screen. You never knew how Ethan came to be an agent. We joined him and he was right in the thick of it, whereas with Benji you saw him as an IT guy and then he became a secret agent.

There’s a scene in the last Mission film, Rogue Nation, where we see Benji playing video games. It got me thinking, what do Ethan and his IMF team do when they’re not saving the world from terrorists and nuclear bombs?

Benji’s playing video games. I think he plays Fortnite with Ethan, and he’s better than Ethan. He kicks Ethan’s butt.

Fallout picks up on the events after Rogue Nation. Were you happy to see it tie so closely into that film?

I think this series has been really smart in that each one can exist on its own and can be watched without having seen any of the others. You don’t really need to have seen Rogue Nation before this one. But there was such emotional ground covered on the last one that it seemed a shame to reset. I think it would have been an opportunity squandered if we did that.

Tom has performed some thrilling stunts in the Mission movies. Which is your favourite and which scares you the most?

It has to be the helicopter stunt from this one because he did do it. We’ve seen helicopter stunts before, but this pushes the envelope of that kind of filming, plus it’s him flying the helicopter. That was the scariest thing. When we left New Zealand knowing that Tom and Henry (Cavill) and Chris were going to stay behind and shoot that sequence there was a slightly heavy sense of dread. We knew what they were in for and while Tom is a pilot, you can’t stall helicopters and recover. The stuff he was training to do; he trained hard, but there was a real sense of, ‘This might go wrong.’