Mission: Impossible – Fallout is receiving a lot of praise for finally putting Tom Cruise‘s Ethan Hunt on the forefront as a character and giving his character space to breathe and grow. The story was already much deeper than expected from the Mission: Impossible franchise, but it turns out that the original idea was supposed to be a lot darker.
In Fallout, Hunt is forced to assume the identity of the terrorist John Lark and finds himself faced with difficult choices in this form. But according to the author-director Christopher McQuarrie this case of secret identity was originally intended to be the film’s key plot, and he was going to force the character in much darker places.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, McQuarrie explained how it was supposed to go down and why he ultimately chose not to take that path.
“[When] They go into the bathroom, the idea was to take John Lark’s identity, Ethan eventually had to assume the identity of Lark without the mask. to be the plot of the whole film: Ethan assumes the identity of the villain, but he looks like himself.And he must continue to convince people that he is the bad guy who forces Ethan to do darker and more horrible things in pursuit of his goal, the first of which was to take Lane out of prison.
That would eventually lead Ethan down a very dark path, which Tom really kissed, and which I pursued for a very long time. But, by hooking on this idea, I realized that the film was not going forward.It was becoming more and more about this idea. This was to the detriment of all the other characters, and the film became very long before returning to the things you are forced to do it in Mission: Impossible. So, I let it go, and as soon as I let it go, the whole segment of the film s England came together. “
So, what does this mean for Ethan’s character? How dark would his character have gone? Would he have gone as far as to kill an innocent? McQuarrie wasn’t willing to fully answer that question since his ideas might just come back in another sequel.
“I’m going to withhold a detailed answer to that because the lesson I have learned is that anything we throw out comes back. The example being: when Lane says to Ethan––’Your mission should you choose to accept it… did you ever choose not to…?’––that was a scene we cut out of Rogue Nation. There was a confrontation between them earlier in the film, and for a lot of reasons, we had to take it out.
Ultimately, I was grateful that we did because it was in the wrong place. And then, it came back to work in Fallout. I will say that I wrote a scene that took Ethan to a very dark place, and when I pitched it to Tom, he said, ‘Well, how about this?’ Tom took the scene even darker, and I was quite surprised. I said, ‘Do you really want to go there with Ethan?’ Tom replied, ‘If we’re going to go for it, let’s go for it.’ So, it taught me something in terms of the boundaries of this character and the boundaries this franchise are even more limitless than I thought.”
It would’ve been really interesting, had McQuarrie gone ahead with his dark Ethan undercover narrative. Mission: Impossible – Fallout is in cinemas now.
Source: THR
