According to Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise regretted killing off his “Mission: Impossible” character so much in the first film that he tried to bring him back for the sequel.
“’Man, we made such a mistake killing you off,’” Estevez recalled Cruise saying. “He and John Woo were trying to figure out a way to bring me back for Part 2, but it just didn’t make sense.”
The actor shared the “Mission: Impossible” memory in an interview with Uproxx, published Tuesday. Recalling how he was first cast in the franchise, Estevez weighed whether or not the death of his character in the first “Mission: Impossible” was payback for Cruise’s death after appearing in “Young Guns.”
“No, it wasn’t that at all. 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 said. “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.”
The franchise has gone on to have six films total, with a seventh and eighth on the way. “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” hits theaters this July.
“[They’re] still making them!” Estevez exclaimed, before revealing that Cruise expressed remorse over Estevez’s inability to come back into the fold.
“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 said. “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. I thought you could have because with all the masks, right?”
But it remained an unrealistic pipe dream — Estevez’s character was smashed by an elevator, after all.
