Famous actor was initially cast in bathroom brawl but dropped out as 'couldn’t keep pace with Cruise and Cavill'

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/henry-cavill-interview-witcher-superman-1235044553/

The brutal four-minute bathroom brawl with Cavill’s character August Walker and Cruise’s Ethan Hunt in Fallout was originally going to include another well-known male actor in the sequence’s third role.

The idea was that audiences would be surprised that Hunt and Walker’s target was played by this other actor, then would be even more shocked when the character was abruptly killed off. The actor was put into a “fight evaluation” but couldn’t keep pace with Cruise and Cavill — which is why one of the film’s stuntmen, Liang Yang, was cast as the scene’s third fighter. “It’s a sequence other actors, when learning the level of commitment required, simply opted out,” McQuarrie says.

Walker was killed off in Fallout, a move that McQuarrie says fans have given him endless grief about on social media, yet the franchise has methods of bringing back familiar faces. Cavill doesn’t appear in the upcoming seventh film, but an appearance in the planned eighth film remains possible. “I’m in the process of rewriting Mission: 8 right now, this afternoon I could turn a page and any actor from the past could come back,” the director teases. “There is no such thing as death in movies, only unavailability.”