Grace in Mission: Impossible: Who She Is and Who Plays Her

Grace is a professional thief who gets pulled into the Impossible Missions Force story when she lifts a cruciform key half from Ethan Hunt in Abu Dhabi. She first appears in Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), directed by Christopher McQuarrie, and she arrives as an outsider rather than an IMF agent.

Who played Grace in Mission: Impossible? Hayley Atwell plays her in both of her films, billed second behind Tom Cruise each time. The cast lists credit the character simply as Grace, so a search for her real name leads to the actress, Hayley Atwell.

The key she steals is one of two halves that join into a single object tied to the Entity, the rogue artificial intelligence at the center of the final two films. That makes Grace an unusual newcomer: she is not brought in for loyalty or training, but for what she can take. Ethan, who has already carried six earlier films, suddenly has to work with someone who owes the IMF nothing.

She belongs to the Mission: Impossible characters who arrive late in the saga, alongside Gabriel and Paris. If you are new to the order of events, the Mission: Impossible movies in order page shows where Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning sit, and the Mission: Impossible cast page lists everyone who returns.

Grace starts as a hired pair of hands and finishes as the person who locks down the Entity, and the distance between those two points is her whole arc. Her first appearance in Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One is a pickpocket's win over Ethan Hunt in Abu Dhabi.

Rome brings a reversal, because Ethan gets her out of police custody and she vanishes again almost at once. Venice explains who she was working for: the arms dealer Alanna Mitsopolis, credited as The White Widow, held the second key half and had paid her to take the first. At that party Gabriel announces that harm to Ilsa or Grace would cost him the key, and then he kills Ilsa Faust. Grace is now a named piece on his board, which is a long way from a freelance job.

The Orient Express is where she earns her place in the team. She lifts the key from Kittridge, who is posing as the buyer, while Ethan drops onto the roof by parachute. Gabriel takes the key and destroys a bridge, sending the carriages into a gorge. Ethan and Grace come out alive, and Paris dies after explaining how the key links to the sunken Sevastopol.

In Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning, the Entity tightens its grip on nuclear systems while Ethan keeps the source code key away from it and goes after the Podkova module in the wreck. Once Ethan fits the Poison Pill into the Podkova in the air, Grace is the one who traps the Entity before it can launch. In my opinion, that is the neatest turn in the saga's late years: a thief who began by taking things ends by holding the most dangerous thing in the story.

Grace's most important relationship is with Ethan Hunt, and it is a partnership built on a theft rather than on trust. She takes the key from him in Abu Dhabi, he frees her from custody in Rome, and by the end of the train sequence they have survived a wreck together. Neither film presents them as a couple, so the answer to whether Ethan and Grace end up together is no: she gives him the drive that holds the Entity, and the team goes its separate ways.

Her relationship with Gabriel is adversarial and personal. He names her in his warning at the Venice party, which ties her fate to the key, and he is the reason the train sequence turns lethal. Her scene with Kittridge is short but pointed: she picks the key from him on the Orient Express while he poses as a buyer.

Mitsopolis, played by Vanessa Kirby as The White Widow, paid Grace to steal the first key half, and that link explains why Grace was in Abu Dhabi at all. Ilsa Faust faces the same threat from Gabriel as Grace does. Luther Stickell and Benji Dunn are the established IMF faces she works alongside once Ethan's team forms around the hunt for the Entity. Paris, who dies in the train wreck, is another newcomer whose story overlaps with Grace's, and in The Final Reckoning the team frees Paris from prison early on.

No, Grace does not die in either film. She survives the Orient Express wreck at the end of Dead Reckoning Part One, and she is alive at the close of The Final Reckoning.

In her last scene she hands Ethan the drive that holds the Entity, after she traps it before it can launch the nuclear weapons. The Podkova is destroyed, Luther's farewell message plays, Briggs makes amends, and the team splits up. Gabriel dies in a crash after a biplane chase, and Luther is the character who sacrifices himself, so the heaviest losses fall elsewhere.

The Final Reckoning was released in May 2025 as the final film, and no sequel has been announced, so Grace's status stays alive. For anything planned beyond that, the Mission: Impossible 9 page tracks what has and has not been reported.

In my opinion, Grace's best moments are the ones where the script lets her be a thief first and a hero second, and the Abu Dhabi theft is the cleanest example. Taking the key half from Ethan Hunt, the series' most prepared man, sets her up as a problem he cannot plan around.

The Orient Express sequence is my pick for her peak. She picks the key from Kittridge while he is acting as the buyer, and that small sleight of hand matters in a set piece that ends with a bridge blown and train cars falling into a gorge. It could be argued that the sequence is the saga at its best, a quiet con wrapped inside a huge stunt, and Grace is the quiet half of it.

The Venice party is where her stakes become clear. Gabriel's warning about Ilsa and Grace turns her from a hired hand into a target, and Ilsa's death right after it shows the threat is real.

In The Final Reckoning, trapping the Entity before it launches is the payoff. Perhaps the neatest part is the handoff of the drive to Ethan afterward, because it lets a character who started by stealing end by giving something back. If you want to see the stunt work around her scenes, the Mission: Impossible stunts page covers the series' set pieces.