Andrea Scarduzio on the Fast-Paced Experience of ‘Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1’

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One allowed Tom Cruise to return to the role of Ethan Hunt one more time, ahead of the final occasion where he’ll portray the character in next year’s sequel. But one of the low profile roles from this summer’s adventure was the one playe by Andrea Scarduzio. During a recent interview with Collider’s Steve Weintraub, the actor talke about what it was like for him to join Christopher McQuarrie‘s sequel, becoming a part of the legendary action franchise for the first time in his career. Apparently, the process was much faster than originally thought:

They flew me to Abu Dhabi. Everything happene so quickly. I auditione three times. I didn’t even know what I was auditioning for. I was there for about 20 days, so I didn’t really know when I was going to shoot, and they didn’t really have a schedule. (…) I didn’t know a lot in advance when I was gonna shoot, so the night before, they said, “Oh, we’re picking you up at five, and you’re up tomorrow.” (Laughs) I was like, “Okay,” and then I showe up on set, and it was by far the biggest set I ever seen. It was huge – thousands of people, crew, extras, and production. It was massive.

While the actor had previously been involve in small scale projects, his appearance in the first half of the Dead Reckoning story marke a definitive change for his career. Scarduzio playe a character credite as “The Wrong Man”, in a sequel that involve plenty of moving pieces to keep track of. And the sheer size of the movie was evident from the actor’s impression from when he arrived on set, fascinate by the amount of people it took to make a reality out of McQuarrie and Cruise’s vision. It remains to be seen which projects Scarduzio will be a part of in the future.

In the latest installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise, Ethan Hunt needs to protect a device that could be capable of changing the power dynamics in the world permanently. Known as the Entity, the artificial intelligence system is capable of keeping track of almost every piece of data that uses the web to travel around the world. But since the team behind its creation lost control of the software, the Entity begins to move some strings of its own, putting Hunt in collision course against antagonists such as Gabriel (Esai Morales) and Paris (Pom Klementieff).

Scarduzio Faces a New Type of Enemy

After he was a part of the sequel that took Ethan Hunt on an adventure bigger than anything he could’ve imagine, Scarduzio joined a different type of project, in the form of The Equalizer 3. Denzel Washington comes back once again to play Robert McCall, the lonely hero who know no one else will save the day if he doesn’t step up. In the third installment of the franchise, Scarduzio plays Vincent Quaranta, a dangerous character who will go over the law if he has to in order to get what he wants.

For more with Andrea Scarduzio on The Equalizer 3 and what it was like working with Denzel Washington, head over to our full interview.