After leaving a major impact on audiences in Mission: Impossible, fans have been left to wonder where Henry Czerny‘s Kittridge has been after serving as a foil to Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, with Czerny recently revealing that the backstory of what he’s been doing in the 25 years since that film largely was left up to him ahead of his return in the upcoming Mission: Impossible 7. While that original film originally saw Kittridge as an antagonist to Hunt before ultimately accepting Hunt’s assistance in uncovering a conspiracy, Czerny noted that the tension between them might not entirely be resolved when we next see them.
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“I decided that he’d been to all the agencies on some level or other, had a good idea now of how the game is played and what his place is in this mechanism of national intelligence,” Czerny recalled to /Film about what his character has been up to. “I figured he’d been through all of them at this point, and he’d been schooled by Ethan 25 years ago. He’s known Ethan, he’s known he’s done these things, and he knows that Ethan is someone to go to, but he also feels that it’s not ever good to have one person controlling anything.”
In recent years, the Mission: Impossible series has featured a number of characters returning to assist Hunt, though when some are killed off or replaced, the narrative explains their absence. In the earlier years of the franchise, however, there was less connective tissue, with directors Brian De Palma, John Woo, and J.J. Abrams all being able to take different approaches to the concept, with those first three entries into the franchise embracing different elements of the premise.
Another trend in the film series is that not all characters are actually who they seem to be, resulting in surprising reveals in which some come to the aid of Hunt while others turn their backs on him. Kittridge, on the other hand, sounds as though he occupies the ambiguous space between ally and enemy.
“There’s a respect, but at the same time, it’s like fire. We need fire because we’ve got to cook, but you got to be careful with it,” the actor continued. “If you let fire do what it wants, you’re in trouble. The relationship that they had in the first one, Ethan schooling Kittridge on who the mole really was and catching the mole, was the springboard to 25 years of Kittridge going through different agencies so he wouldn’t be schooled again.”
Despite only appearing in the initial installment, Czerny was thrilled to return to the series, adding, “The fact that they’ve done it for this long and this well is extraordinary. I’m glad that [the franchise] is up and running after 25 years. And I get a chance to come back as someone who’s 25 years older and offer up whatever I can to it.”
Mission: Impossible 7 is set to hit theaters on May 27, 2022.
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