One of the big surprise announcements regarding the upcoming “Mission: Impossible 7” is the return of actor Henry Czerny in the role of Kittridge.
Czerny last played the character, director of the Impossible Mission Force (IMF), back in the first ‘Mission’ film a full twenty-five years ago now and the news of his joining the cast has been universally well-received.
In the original film, Kittridge mistakenly thought Ethan Hunt was a mole within his agency – ultimately he was proven wrong. So where has he been all this time? Czerny tells Slashfilm director Christopher McQuarrie called him up and asked the actor “I want to dig around with Kittredge. Are you up to it?.”
Czerny took a little while to think it over before agreeing to do it and then enjoyed digging back into the character and come up with a way to fill in the gap between films:
“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. 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.
There’s 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. 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.”
Czerny also says he’s just happy to be along for the ride and finds it “extraordinary” the franchise is still chugging along so successfully.
