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Girl Of The Moment: Rebecca Ferguson

Girl Of The Moment: Rebecca Ferguson
Girl Of The Moment: Rebecca Ferguson

Rebecca Ferguson at the premiere of her Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. Photo: Getty Images

Gaining acclaim as Elizabeth I in hit BBC series The White Queen was one thing. Winning the female lead opposite Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation was quite another. But, fresh from her corseted turn as the Virgin Queen in 2013, that’s exactly where Swedish-born actress Rebecca Ferguson found herself.

On day one of shooting, Ferguson, 31, was strapped to Cruise, rappelling from the roof of the Vienna Opera House. “My heart was on the outside,” she grins. Cruise, who performs his own stunts, was impressed. “He wrote me a note that said, ‘Thank you for taking this first leap with me,’” she reveals.

As undercover agent Ilsa Faust, Ferguson follows in the franchise footsteps of Thandie Newton, Léa Seydoux and Kristin Scott Thomas, but is the first to really go toe-to-toe with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt. “She’s an equal,” says Ferguson.

Off-screen, she likes her share of action (“I dive and go surfing”), but also relishes reading Harry Potter to her eight-year-old son. They live in Simrishamn, a village on Sweden’s south coast that’s all “woolly socks, no make-up” – though she’s barely been home recently. “I travel so much, it feels like I’m living everywhere.”

The jetsetting lifestyle looks set to continue. Most recently, Ferguson has been in the UK filming Florence Foster Jenkins (with Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant). It tells the true story of an aristocratic New York soprano who couldn’t actually sing, and will hit our screens next year.