Hannah Waddingham has revealed she asked Tom Cruise for reassurance after suffering from impostor syndrome while promoting Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.
The Ted Lasso star plays Admiral Neely, the captain of the George HW Bush aircraft carrier, in the new blockbuster, which is believed to be the final instalment in the long-running action franchise.
Despite being a famous name in her own right, Ted Lasso star Waddingham said that she recently became overwhelmed at the premiere of the movie at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.
“Cannes is a completely different beast,” she told The Times. “Walking up plenty of stairs in the gown is a bit like, ‘Don’t be the w***er who falls!’ That’s a lot of pink taffeta up in the air.”
When asked if she is a confident person, Waddingham, who also stars in the live-action version of Lilo and Stitch, admitted that she had to ask Cruise for advice when being snapped by photographers on the red carpet at Cannes.
“I have massive impostor syndrome all the time,” she said. “I went, ‘How do you do this?’ under my breath. He [Cruise] looked at me and went, ‘I really want you to just have fun.’”
Cruise is no stranger to giving co-stars advice about social anxiety.
Hayley Atwell, who plays Grace in the Mission: Impossible films, told the Reign with Josh Smith podcast: “Social anxiety tends to be something that people talk about a lot at the moment, right? And how a lot of people do have social anxiety at some point.
“It manifests in different ways, but the pep talk he gave me helps that, which is if you walk into a room and you feel the anxieties coming, and it makes me want to retreat into myself, I start to overthink, and go: ‘Do I look weird? Do I seem awkward?’
“We go into ourselves, and [Cruise] said: ‘Try doing the opposite. Try to look out, look around the room, and go, ‘Where is it? Where is the thing that I have attached to my insecurity?’ Is it that person over there that reminds me of my school bully? That person over there didn’t give me a job once? That person over there that I think was mean to me once?’”
Cruise explained to Atwell that his method of reducing anxiety was to pinpoint “where it [lives] outside of” him and recognising where it comes from.
“I look at it for long enough, the anxiety then can have a name. It can have a label or what will happen is, I’ll go: ‘Oh, you’re really jealous’ or ‘I’m really lonely’ or ‘I’m really intimidated by the talent or the confidence of that person.’ As soon as I can name what it actually is, the general sense of free-floating anxiety goes and then I actually have an opportunity to do something about it,” she recalled.
“So he was just like: ‘If you are scared of something just keep looking at it. Just try not to close your eyes or turn away. Just keep looking at it and it will often give you information about what to do to overcome it.’”
