The very first Mission: Impossible movie opened with Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and the IMF team on a mission to prevent the theft of the CIA NOC list. The mission fails when the members of Hunt’s team are killed one by one, which was a surprising twist when the movie was released nearly thirty years ago. One member of the ill-fated Mission: Impossible team was played by Emilio Estevez, and the actor told Uproxx that Tom Cruise expressed regret at killing off his character so soon.
“The way Tom had explained it, he said, ‘Look, I’d love for you to come and join the cast. The whole opening number where everybody gets wiped out, it’s going to be a lot of well-known people and all of them are going to go uncredited and it’s really going to set up the level of peril for Ethan,’” Emilio Estevez explained. “And I said, ‘I’m in. You don’t have to ask me twice, I’m in.’ And then afterwards, obviously, the movie’s a giant hit.” He added that he was doing a run with Tom Cruise a year after, who said, “Man, we made such a mistake killing you off.“
Emilio Estevez also revealed that Tom Cruise and John Woo did consider bringing him back for Mission: Impossible 2. “He and John Woo were trying to figure out a way to bring me back for part two, but it just didn’t make sense,” Estevez said. “I thought you could have because with all the masks, right?” Killing off the entire team did help set the stakes for Ethan Hunt, but subsequent installments of the Mission: Impossible franchise really played up the team dynamic to great effect. The characters played by Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Jeremy Renner, and more have appeared in multiple sequels, and of course, Ving Rhames has played Luther Stickell in every movie. It’s not hard to imagine a world in which Emilio Estevez continued to play a role in the franchise.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One will hit theaters on July 12th, followed by Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two on June 28, 2024.