Star Henry Czerny has opened up about where his character Eugene Kittridge has been and what he's been doing in the 25 years between the original Mission: Impossible and the in-production Mission: Impossible 7. Plot details are currently unknown on the next Tom Cruise-led outing, though it has been revealed that Esai Morales will be Mission: Impossible 7's villain opposite IMF legend Ethan Hunt. Alongside Cruise, Czerny, and Morales, the ensemble cast for the film will include returning actors Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, and Angela Bassett.
Production on the film was originally announced to be back-to-back with the eighth installment in the series, with Christopher McQuarrie returning to write and direct both entries. However, due to changing release schedules stemming from the global pandemic, Paramount elected to halt Mission: Impossible 7 and 8's back-to-back plans and instead focus on the current chapter before pressing on with the next. After assembling an all-star cast of franchise newcomers including Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, Shea Whigham, Rob Delaney, Charles Parnell, Indira Varma, Mark Gatiss, and Cary Elwes, filming has gone on from February 2020 to this April.
While chatting with /Film for the upcoming 25th anniversary of the franchise's inaugural outing, Czerny revealed that when McQuarrie called him up to return to the role of Kittridge, the filmmaker didn't have an exact plan of what to do with the character. Wanting to have those details to help better shape his performance, Czerny was largely left to his own devices on putting the backstory together for the time gap. He also teased the new relationship between Kittridge and Ethan after the events of the first Mission: Impossible film.
I decided that he’d been to all the agencies on some level or other, had a good idea now of how the game is played and what his place is in this mechanism of national intelligence. I figured he’d been through all of them at this point, and he’d been schooled by Ethan 25 years ago. He’s known Ethan, he’s known he’s done these things, and he knows that Ethan is someone to go to, but he also feels that it’s not ever good to have one person controlling anything...There’s a respect, but at the same time, it’s like fire. We need fire because we’ve got to cook, but you got to be careful with it. If you let fire do what it wants, you’re in trouble. The relationship that they had in the first one, Ethan schooling Kittridge on who the mole really was and catching the mole, was the springboard to 25 years of Kittridge going through different agencies so he wouldn’t be schooled again.
With 25 years between Mission: Impossible 7 and the debut installment in the action franchise, there's certainly been a number of shifts in the universe's government. The position of IMF director and secretary has changed hands countless times across the films from Kittridge to Anthony Hopkins' Swanbeck to Laurence Fishburne's Brassel and Alec Baldwin's Hunley. Given the latter had made his jump from the CIA to the IMF after Rogue Nation, it makes total sense for Kittridge to have elected to move away from his original agency in order to start afresh after being made to look like a fool by Ethan in the original film.
As McQuarrie is now acting as the narrative mastermind behind the M:I franchise, it might seem a little hard to believe he wouldn't have a better plan for Kittridge's return to the Mission: Impossible series. But with him originally developing back-to-back sequels and assembling a large ensemble cast for the first sequel, it either points to the discussions for Czerny's return happening early in the film's development or suggests his role will be a smaller part of the larger puzzle. For now, audiences will have to wait to see what comes when Mission: Impossible 7 hits theaters on May 27, 2022.
Source: /Film
