Hayley Atwell Shares Advice Tom Cruise Gave Her for Social Anxiety: 'If You're Scared of Something, Keep Looking at It'

Hayley Atwell is detailing a "pep talk" from Tom Cruise that should help her during even the most impossible of missions.

The Mission: Impossible actress spoke candidly about her experience with social anxiety — and how her costar once gave her advice to face it head-on during the March 25 episode of the Reign With Josh Smith Podcast.

After defining social anxiety as something that can happen in a "new environment," "work situation" or "friend situation," Atwell, 42, revealed the tip that Cruise, 62, gave her to overcome it.

"If you walk into a room and you feel the anxieties coming, and it makes me want to retreat into myself, and I start to overthink and I start to go, 'Do I look weird? Do I seem awkward? I'm not speaking, I'm just muffling my words or I need something to do to numb me from this,' we go into ourselves," Atwell said. "And he 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 on to my insecurity,'" Atwell recalled of Cruise's advice. "'Is it that person over there that reminds me of my school bully? Is it that person over there that didn't give me a job once? That person over there that I think was mean to me once? Where does it live outside of me and where do I feel like the source of it might be coming from?'"

Atwell joined Cruise in the Mission Impossible franchise with 2023's Dead Reckoning Part One, and will reprise her role as Grace in 2025's The Final Reckoning. Even outside of the films, Cruise has apparently given her plenty of advice. As she explained, looking at the source of her anxieties for "long enough" now means it "can have a name."

"It can also be more contained instead of a free-floating one where I'm just in a total struggle internally with my own anxiety," Atwell said. "And I try and do that now more... If I'm scared of something, if I keep looking at it long enough, it tends to not sort of be the monster under the bed anymore."

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Understanding her anxieties, she added, means she also "has an opportunity to do something about it" by addressing feelings of loneliness, jealousy, or intimidation.

"Like, if I maybe go up to that person and go, 'Hi.' Or I go up to that person and go, 'I'm really jealous of how amazing you are.' It tends to just dissipate," Atwell said. "Being able to call it, to name the demon out loud and leave it on the floor, means that it's not living in me."

"... [Cruise] was just like, 'If you're scared of something, keep looking at it. Try not to close your eyes or turn away, just keep looking at it,'" she recalled of Cruise's message. "It will often give you information about what to do to overcome it."

Atwell's next on-screen appearance with Cruise — The Final Reckoning — is set to premiere in theaters on May 23 as Cruise's eight installment as field agent Ethan Hunt.

Speaking with PEOPLE about joining the series seven movies in, Atwell said in 2023 that she ultimately wasn't "coming into something that's intimidating."

“They're literally going, ‘Oh, my God, we're so happy to have you. Come and join us,'" she recalled. “I loved it, I really did. And you could see from all the actors involved in it — some that are newer than others, some that have been there from the beginning — there's a real affection from [writer-director Christopher McQuarrie] and Tom and the environment that they create… There's no mistake, there's no sense of failure, there's no judgment.”

The Final Reckoning will also feature the returning talents of Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Vanessa Kirby, Shea Whigham, Pom Klementieff and Henry Czerny. Nick Offerman, Bob Odenkirk, Janet McTeer, Hannah Waddingham and Katy O'Brian will also be joining the ensemble for its eighth installment.