Tom Cruise gave himself an impossible task: Smoothing things over with longtime pal Emilio Estevez.
According to Estevez in an Uproxx interview, Cruise regretted killing off his character in 1996 film “Mission: Impossible,” which kicked off an almost three-decade-long franchise. Cruise plays rogue CIA agent Ethan Hunt, with the original Brian de Palma film infamously having a bloody cold open killing off most of the A-lister cast.
“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,’” Estevez recalled. “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.”
“Mission: Impossible” has spurred seven sequels, with the final two installments, “Dead Reckoning” parts one and two, debuting in 2023 and 2024. The next films are helmed by Christopher McQuarrie, who directed “Fallout” and “Rogue Nation,” with Cruise serving as a producer. Production for “Dead Reckoning Part One” was repeatedly halted by the COVID-19 pandemic but eventually wrapped in September 2021.
“[They’re] still making them!” Estevez said. “Tom was like, we were doing a run the year after that and he says, ‘Man, we made such a mistake killing you off.’”
Estevez added that “Mission: Impossible 2” director John Woo even discussed having Estevez return in a different role.
“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,” he said. “I thought you could have because with all the masks, right?”
Estevez appears in former “St. Elmo’s Fire” co-star Andrew McCarthy’s upcoming documentary on the ’80s Brat Pack, to which he compared Cruise and McCarthy, saying he would work with them in any capacity “without question.”
“It was like Tom: The people who never ask, you just say yes,” Estevez said. “It’s like a Willy Wonka moment. You just say, ‘Yeah, of course. I’ll participate.’”
