Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One may not be yielding the box office numbers it was hoping for just yet, but that was never going to stop the narrative of Tom Cruise being cinema’s greatest boon at the moment. Between driving a motorbike straight off a cliff or roping your co-stars into a grueling pilot’s boot camp, there’s no denying that the man goes the extra mile for that final product on the big screen.
Suffice to say, after the movie star reignited post-pandemic theaters everywhere with Top Gun: Maverick, the Cruise bug was very much in the air, and one of the actor’s recruits for Maverick just might have been patient zero.
Indeed, not many folks can say they’ve starred alongside Cruise in two separate franchises, but one Greg Tarzan Davis is officially on that list as of Dead Reckoning Part One. After portraying mission candidate Javy “Coyote” Machado in Maverick, the Grey’s Anatomy star followed Cruise over to the Mission: Impossible saga, where he stepped into the shoes of Degas, an enforcer for the U.S. Intelligence Community who guns for a rogue Ethan Hunt alongside his partner Briggs.
It was quite an upgrade for Davis, whose role in Dead Reckoning was much meatier than that in Maverick, and while it’s no stretch to assume that the actor was buzzing at the development, he kept his fellow actors-turned-pilots in the dark about his casting.
In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Davis opened up about how highly he regards the art of keeping a secret; an attitude he exercised by keeping his mouth shut on his Mission: Impossible involvement.
“I am big on holding secrets. I hate spoilers. So when I booked Mission, they found out later from a press release photo of me on top of the train with Tom, Esai [Morales] and Shea. They were like, ‘You didn’t tell us that you were on Mission!’ And I was like, ‘My bad, my bad.’”
In any case, Degas will certainly be one to watch as the Dead Reckoning story continues to unfold next summer; Part One saw the character wrestle with some marked internal conflict, and we can only imagine that will come to a front in a big way during the events of Part Two.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is now playing in theaters.