Angela Bassett’s ‘Mission: Impossible’ Stunt’: ‘Walking’ (Exclusive)

Angela Bassett is getting in on the Mission: Impossible action — in a manner of speaking. 

“It’s thrilling, the stuff that they do,” the actress, 66, says of Tom Cruise and his filmmaking team on the stunt-heavy franchise. “It’s just mind-blowing.”

Did Bassett have any desire, as U.S. President Erika Sloane in the upcoming Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, to do any death-defying feats of her own? “Absolutely not,” the Oscar nominee tells PEOPLE in the new special Mission: Impossible issue.

“I definitely don’t have FOMO [the fear of missing out],” she says, adding contentedly, “my only stunt is walking.”

Bassett first played Sloane in 2018’s sixth installment Fallout, when the character headed the CIA. Now president and facing higher stakes including an A.I. threat in Final Reckoning (in theaters May 23), Bassett says she considers her role one of the franchise’s “instruments, a part of an orchestra.”

She adds that Sloane’s push-and-pull relationship with Cruise’s Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt, established in Fallout, means exploring “levels of ‘I don’t want you doing that — do I really not want you doing that?’ ‘Can we work together as you’re doing that, because you’re going to do it anyway?’ ”

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Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie and of course Cruise, 62, were welcome partners in weaving Sloane back into the franchise’s story, says Bassett. The producer-star is “nothing but pure enthusiasm — he just wants to pull the best out of everyone.”

As for portraying an American president who happens to be female onscreen — twice this year, counting Netflix’s series Zero Day! — Bassett can’t help but reflect on the fact that such a notion remains in the realm of fiction rather than reality. “Whenever I’m portraying them, I’m hoping and waiting for the day when life will imitate art,” she says. “We always talk about the idea of seeing yourself in film or theater, seeing what’s possible. So the film is aspirational in its way.”

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, costarring Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny and more, is in theaters May 23.

For more on the franchise, including exclusive interviews and behind-the-scenes photos, PEOPLE’s special edition is out now.