Warning: mild SPOILERS for Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One are in play. If you’re not current on the adventures of Ethan Hunt, you’ve been warned.
As Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One represents the latest step in storytelling from one of the best action movie franchises around, it seems that Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt was always bound to confront his past. This massive two-part narrative has been half told, and in the opinion of co-writer/director Christopher McQuarrie, it was the right time to play that card.
Part of that notion was expressed through bringing back Henry Czerny’s Eugene Kittridge from the 1996 origin of Ethan Hunt’s Mission: Impossible story. With that seed in mind, McQuarrie went one step further, as he revealed to our own Sean O’Connell during the Mission: Impossible 7 press day. And as he told CinemaBlend during that very sitdown, Esai Morales being cast as the villainous Gabriel also cemented that plotline through a very personal connection:
You know, it really came down to the casting of Esai Morales. We don’t start these stories with a specific role, and then go looking for the actor. We cast the actor, and then find the role together. Esai and Tom have known each other, going all the way back to the very very beginning of their career. That notion inspired this idea of a relationship between the hero and the villain, and it was something that the franchise really hadn’t done.
Heading up the franchise since 2015’s Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, the man some call “McQ” has a pretty unique insight into how this saga works. As the writer/director who has stuck around for the longest stretch in the entire franchise, Christopher McQuarrie has brought the concept of serialization to the world of Ethan Hunt.
Tying in pretty much every Mission into one cohesive whole, marathoning each of the previous entries with a Paramount+ subscription is about to feel like even more of a necessity. Further building on that foundation, Esai Morales’ antagonist Gabriel is a presence that was literally present for Ethan Hunt’s origins.
While he’s technically a new character for the Dead Reckoning Part One audience, Gabriel is revealed to be a pre-existing evil, as well as a key player in showing us all how to become an IMF agent. So having Esai Morales' relationship with Tom Cruise fuel that development made for some exciting, and borderline method acting, madness when seeing the two clash on screen. However, based on McQuarrie’s comments above, it sounds like that wasn’t always the case.
Indeed, one has to wonder what this villain would have been like if actor Nicholas Hoult had stayed on the project. As Hoult’s role on The Great led to him dropping out of this summer tentpole, those conflicts lead to Esai Morales’ Mission: Impossible 7 casting. That said, if it wasn’t for Gabriel, we might not have seen the return of one of the greatest frenemies in Ethan Hunt’s life: CIA Director Eugene Kittridge.
Henry Czerny’s legacy character made a hell of a splash when Christopher McQuarrie announced his return for Mission: Impossible 7, as well as its direct sequel. As he was last seen negotiating the deal that helped Maxine Mitsopolis (Vanessa Redgrave) pave the way for her daughter Alana (Vanessa Kirby) to keep the family arms business running, that thread apparently became something that McQ was eager to develop.
Explaining how his work on Mission: Impossible - Fallout also stoked the fires of past sins, Christopher McQuarrie brought it all together with the following details, also shared with CinemaBlend:
Bringing back Henry Czerny as Kittridge seemed a natural extension of that. This idea that Ethan’s past was coming back to haunt him. That’s also something I’ve always been fascinated with. I dealt with it a little bit in Fallout, and I wanted to go deeper with it here, in Dead Reckoning Part One.
Though we’re not totally sure what Eugene Kittridge has been doing in the years since Mission: Impossible, Czerny has his own notes on his Dead Reckoning backstory that make total sense. It all adds up to a mission so great, it had to be split between the seventh and eighth installments, creating a massive reckoning for Ethan Hunt and his IMF team. And the best part is, we’re only halfway through that story’s course of events.
For now, we’ll have to wait and see how Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two further develops Esai Morales and Henry Czerny’s characters. The grand finale to this duology is currently scheduled to debut on the 2024 movie schedule on June 28th. Dead Reckoning Part One, on the other hand, is currently showing at a theater near you.
