When Henry Cavill decided to grow a moustache for Mission: Impossible – Fallout, nobody could have predicted the trouble it would cause. The facial fuzz impacted two major blockbusters when DC superhero-thon Justice League ended up requiring major re-shoots, for which Cavill needed to be clean-shaven. But with Cavill still mid-Mission and sporting some rather impressive upper lip hair, Justice League famously had to digitally erase the moustache from Cavill’s extra scenes.
Speaking to Empire in part one of the Empire Podcast’s epic multi-hour Fallout spoiler special interview, director Christopher McQuarrie opened up about ‘moustache-gate’, discussing why it wouldn’t have worked for Cavill to shave and use a stick-on 'tache instead. “Everybody out there who's been taking shots at me on Twitter for however long you have, a fake moustache in close-up on a 75mm lens is never going to look like anything but a fake moustache in close-up with a 75mm lens,” the director said. “And if you have any doubts about that, just go back and watch Tom Cruise in Rogue Nation with his beard and moustache. It's passable for a scene, not for a film. It's just never going to work.”
McQuarrie also stated that he originally did give permission for Cavill to shave, even though it would have held up Fallout’s production for weeks. "When the reshoots for Justice League came up [Justice League producer] Chuck Roven called me, and he said, 'We need your help, and we need to shave Henry's moustache. We need him to come back and we need to do these reshoots,'” McQuarrie recalled. “And I said, 'Look Chuck, naturally I want to do everything I can to help you, but I also have to think about our production. Let me talk to everybody and figure out what the scheduling would be.' And I went and spoke to [Mission producer] Jake Myers and the suggestion was made through channels that we shave the moustache, Henry begin to grow the moustache back, and that they would give us the resources to digitally fill in Henry's moustache.
"So, we offered the following compromise – Jake Myers calculated the amount of money that it would take to replace the number of shots. And essentially what Jake was able to project is about a $3 million visual effects budget. So, I don't know how much Henry was in Justice League, I've never seen the movie, but I can tell you how much it would have cost for Mission: Impossible to digitally add Henry Cavill's moustache – and we said yes. We said, here's what we'll do – give us the $3 million and we'll shut down, and that'll give Henry Cavill the time to grow his moustache back. And we'll just shut our movie down. This was before Tom broke his ankle, if other things had worked out the way they had, but this was- and Tom breaking his ankle did not coincide with their reshoots. Nothing worked out. But we said, 'We'll do this.'
“At which point, somebody from Paramount Pictures said, 'What is going on? What are you people even talking about?' They were like, 'There's no way we're going to do that, we're not shutting down.' So we were just like, ‘OK well that was the best plan that we could come up with.’ The truth of the matter was, somebody was going digital. And we respected very much the dilemma that they were in and came up with the best solution that we could in order for it to work out for everybody. But it truly... it was insane, it was a point where you could not predict, was this going to impact our release date? And ultimately everybody was looking at us saying, well why can't you compromise? And we very politely said back, 'That's not our thing to do. But here's the compromise that we're willing to make.'”
While the resulting Cavill-jaw CGI in Justice League caused titters across the internet, McQuarrie said he takes no pleasure in the jokes around the reshoots. “Nobody wanted to stick it to Justice League, nobody wanted to hurt those people,” he said. “Most of the people asking me [about it] are asking me to celebrate it and have a little fun with it, and I don't think it's funny. I don't think shoe-gate was funny on the last movie when they were dinging Jurassic Park. I want everybody to win, I want everybody's movie to be a success."
Listen to the full Christopher McQuarrie interview on the spoiler-filled Empire Podcast, talking all the film’s major revelations, deleted scenes, and the reason why Jeremy Renner’s Brandt didn’t return. Oh, and this is just part one – a second three-ish hour McQuarrie interview on the film is still to come.
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