Now on the brink of superstardom, the actor talks about working with Tom Cruise, and admits that The Snowman movie may not have been much good – but Michael Fassbender’s on-set fart jokes were fantastic

Rebecca Ferguson is drinking tea in the restaurant of a London hotel. In a dark blue jacket festooned with tiny gold stars, her brunette hair scraped back from her face, she looks perkier than anyone who gave birth six weeks ago has any right to. The 34-year-old Swedish-British actor has been perfectly decent in decent films (such as Florence Foster Jenkins), better than necessary in trashy ones and has even emerged unscathed from a bomb (The Snowman). But it is her performance as Ilsa Faust, a daredevil secret agent in the new Mission: Impossible film and its predecessor, that has nudged her from the ranks of the interesting to the brink of stardom. Her compelling...