While Ferguson, 41, never officially took acting lessons, she received an immersive on the-job education. At just 15, she was cast in Nya Tider, a Swedish soap opera. At the urging of her British mother, who raised her in Sweden and encouraged her to try everything from bridge club to music lessons, Ferguson had auditioned and was selected for the lead role. During the year that she was on the series, she shot two and a half episodes a day. “I definitely was taught to learn lines very fast—quick acting, quick reactions to things,” she reflects. “It was like going to school. I was doing this thing that I liked doing, and I was doing it with incredible actors.”

More than a decade later and after a string of roles in Swedish productions and the birth of her first child, she exploded internationally. In 2013, she earned a Golden Globe nomination for playing King Edward IV’s controversial consort, Elizabeth Woodville, in the BBC historical limited series The White Queen. The role was her English-language debut.

Since then, she’s been a silver-screen fixture, and today, she’s one of Hollywood’s busiest stars. In 2023, her third Mission: Impossible film premiered and the first season of her dystopian series, Silo, landed on Apple TV+. Months later, Dune: Part Two mania erupted, and the sequel became one of 2024’s highest-grossing films. Most recently, she signed on to the highly anticipated Peaky Blinders movie and wrapped filming for Amazon MGM’s thriller Mercy opposite Chris Pratt as well as the adaptation of beloved children’s book series The Magic Faraway Tree with Claire Foy, Andrew Garfield and Nicola Coughlan.

It’s no mystery why she’s in demand. On-camera, she has an otherworldly magnetism and a preternatural grace that oozes into every scene. Before rappelling down a building in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Ferguson wraps her legs around Tom Cruise with a fluidity that makes the high-flying stunt resemble an elegant ballroom manoeuvre.

The day that this moment was filmed, Ferguson wasn’t quite as poised behind the scenes. As it turns out, that stunt was the first-ever scene she shot for the franchise—and it involved jumping off the roof of the Vienna State Opera. “We were doing night shoots,” she recalls. “I rehearsed the drop, and I was terrified of heights.” Before the director yelled “Action” for the first take, Cruise asked Ferguson if she was ready. “I said, ‘No, I’m not motherfucking ready!’” She retells the story with a whisper-scream to illustrate how panicked she was. “I swore into his ear, and he was like, ‘Is that the cue to jump?’
And I was like, ‘Yes!’ It was amazing.”