Tom Cruise helped Hayley Atwell fix THIS problem

Actress Hayley Atwell appeared on an episode of the podcast, Reign With Josh Smith where she opened up about how Tom Cruise had helped her with a particular issue.

The pair worked together on Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, and are set to reprise their roles in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.

“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,” she explained, “It manifests in different ways, but the pep talk [Tom] gave me helps that. 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 Tom said: ‘Try doing the opposite.'”

Cruise told the actress, “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?”

“If 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,” Atwell continued.

She remarked further, “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. 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.’”

Gushing over cruise, the actress said, “When I started, I was very aware of the rarefied air around him and how there is no one like him. And there never will be because actors aren’t made like him any more… He is a one-man studio. And because of that, I felt I was able to try lots of different things. There was never a risk of failure or being unsafe. Tom really likes people to thrive on set.”

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