When Alec Baldwin’s Alan Hunley was introduced in Mission: Impossible — Rouge Nation, he was initially depicted as the CIA director who instigated the shutdown of the Impossible Mission Force and was no fan of Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt. By the end of that movie though, he’d changed his tune, to the point that he became the new IMF Secretary and one of Ethan’s biggest supporters. Sadly, Hunley was killed in the next movie, Fallout, but filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie has revealed that he crafted an intriguing way to feature Baldwin’s character in Dead Reckoning Part One, one of the more recent 2023 new movie release.
McQuarrie stopped by The Empire Spoiler Special Film Podcast to talk about his work on Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh installment in this film series. On the subject of Alec Baldwin, the writer/director who’s been leading the charge on the Mission: Impossible franchise since Rogue Nation said these words about how he’d thought about incorporating Alan Hunley despite the character being dead (via Comicbook.com):
Berlin had been calling our name. There was originally an opening of this movie that began with Tom and Alec Baldwin walking along the Berlin Wall. They're walking along the wall and you slowly realize it's the Berlin Wall. And it's Alec Baldwin talking to Ethan about his life as a spy, how he became a spy. And you realize it's him counseling Ethan. You're seeing a glimpse into the friendship of these two characters that existed prior to Fallout. And you cut and Tom is standing at his grave, having heard the words of wisdom from Alec, and he's just looking at a gravestone that says 'Hunley.' And that notion of Alec Baldwin being a spirit guide to Ethan in his memory was a very, very early idea to the story, something I was keenly interested in.
For those in need of a refresher, Alan Hunley met his demise at the hands of Henry Cavill’s August Walker, the CIA assassin who was revealed to be the extremist known as John Lark. Hunley attempted to stop August from escaping from one of the IMF’s safe houses, and he was fatally stabbed for his trouble. With his dying breath, he instructed Ethan Hunt to chase after August with a simple “Go” (which Cruise himself wrote and was literally phoned in). Remind yourself what happened in the rest of Fallout by streaming it with your Paramount+ subscription.
Interestingly enough, back in January 2019, six months after Fallout was released, it was rumored that Alec Baldwin and Henry Cavill might appear in Mission: Impossible 7, and now we know the former was at least accurate. Although there are many fantastical elements at play in this franchise, resurrection isn’t one of them, so Christopher McQuarrie instead envisioned looking in at a moment between Hunley and Ethan pre-Fallout. Going off the filmmaker’s description, it doesn’t sound like we would have seen a “spirit” version of Hunley next to Ethan after the flashback was over, but the late IMF leader still would have been on our main protagonist’s mind throughout the Dead Reckoning Part One story.
The fact that McQuarrie went into so much detail about his scrapped Alan Hunley plan arguably suggests he has no intention to recycle it for Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part Two, which opens on June 28, 2024. Should that not be the case, or if the eighth Mission: Impossible movie finds a different way to squeeze in Alan Hunley, we’ll let you know. Until then, Dead Reckoning Part One’s theatrical run is wrapping up, and it will reportedly be available to buy digitally starting October 10.
