Fan-Favorite Mission: Impossible Character Finally Getting His Own Story Arc in Next Sequel

Though production on the seventh and eighth films in the Mission: Impossible franchise has been postponed, with the film’s release dates also shifted back, the cast is still eager to get back to the series. Tom Cruise isn’t the only one returning though with the likes of Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, and Simon Pegg all returning. Pegg is among those excited to return, revealing that Benji Dunn will find himself in an unpleasant place after Mission: Impossible – Fallout and that writer/director Christopher McQuarrie has a master plan.

“Benji is a character that’s been really fun to play,” Pegg said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “He’s evolved in each movie, from being a lab technician — who reluctantly gets involved in the action — to being a fresh-faced field agent who thinks, ‘Oh, this is great and fun, and I’m gonna wear a mask,’ to actually experiencing what it’s really about, which is not so pleasant. I’m looking forward to playing him again having been through what he went through on Fallout, which was unpleasant. I can see him not being quite as thrilled with the job, and it’s gonna be fun to play out the narratives that McQ has set up. It’s been a really long journey for him; it’s not about each individual film. He’s tracking a journey for each of those characters, not just Ethan, but all of us.”

McQuarrie himself previously opened up about this in another interview, saying the idea of expanding on all the characters around Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt came to him in the fallout of Mission: Impossible – Fallout.

“When we went into making Fallout, I said to Tom, ‘I really want to make this more of an emotional journey for [Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt],’” McQuarrie explained in a recent interview on the Light the Fuse podcast. “Going into this, I said, ‘I want to take what we learned from Fallout and apply it to every character in the movie. I want everyone to have an emotional arc. … I just want the movie to have more feeling across the board.”

“We realized we had a movie that was two hours, 40 minutes long,” McQuarrie continued. “And every scene in it was necessary.”

Mission: Impossible 7‘s release dates has been put off by four months and is now slated to hit theaters on November 19, 2021. Mission: Impossible 8 will open on November 4, 2022.