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HENRY CZERNY WAS NEVER THE HEADLINER of the Mission: Impossible franchise. He didn’t perform showy stunts. His performance as Ethan Hunt’s skeptical boss in the first movie is essential, but it did not make him a household name—in fact, you may not even know how to pronounce it (it’s cher-nee). But the prolific Canadian actor did earn the distinction of delivering the most enviable piece of dialogue in the series: His is the first voice to say, “Your mission … should you choose to accept it …” “To be able to intone that directive, especially in the first one, it was an extraordinary thrill for me,” says Czerny, who grew up in Toronto watching Mission: Impossible with his older brother. “I couldn’t freaking believe it, and I called my brother…

AFTER SEVEN BLOCKBUSTER installments earning some $4 billion globally, it’s hard to remember a time when a big-screen version of Mission: Impossible didn’t feel like a sure bet at the box office. But during the summer of 1996 the TV spy reboot’s competition at the multiplex would include Independence Day (Will Smith and aliens), The Rock (Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery), The Nutty Professor (Eddie Murphy and Eddie Murphy) and Twister (Jan de Bont’s Speed follow-up), not to mention all that was promised in the title of Demi Moore’s latest that year: Striptease. Could audiences be lured by a nostalgic connection to the original CBS series? The Cold War-set drama and its infectious theme music were cultural touchstones, even if the show never climbed beyond 12th place in the Nielsen…

Sight at the Opera In 2015’s Rogue Nation the IMF gets intel that a sniper working for the Syndicate is planning to assassinate the Austrian chancellor during a performance of Puccini’s Turandot at the Vienna State Opera. Ethan and Benji race to the concert to find three snipers in attendance. One has a long-barreled gun disguised as a bass flute and another—M:I-6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson, above)—is wielding a rifle camouflaged as a backstage scaffold rail. She assembles her weapon and takes aim. Ethan foils her before she can pull the trigger, but that’s hardly the end of Ilsa’s story. (Wish we could say the same for the chancellor.) Chew on This In the first Mission, IMF operative Jack Harmon (Emilio Estevez, left, with Jon Voight and Cruise)…

NO, WE DID NOT HAVE A SHEEP DELAY. That was one of those fun stories I love reading on the Internet,” says four-time Mission: Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie. As with the making of any big-budget, high-stakes sequel, Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning’s production inspired some rumors. “People have nothing better to do,” he says. Yes, there was a pause for the Hollywood union strikes. Yes, they scuttled plans to shoot concurrently with M:I-7. But no, there was no interruption caused by sheep in the English countryside, okay? Having cleared that up, McQuarrie adds: “There was a cow delay.” While filming aerial sequences over South Africa, he reports, “some cows wandered onto our runway, and our planes couldn’t land. They were low on fuel, and we had a tractor gently coax…

AFTER SIX MISSION FILMS spanning nearly 20 years, Simon Pegg knows he’d better show up to set ready for anything. “Within an hour of arriving in Venice for Dead Reckoning,” recalls the English actor who plays Benji Dunn, the IMF tech turned field agent, “I was out on the canals learning how to drive a water taxi.” Later, in South Africa, he and Tom Cruise shot a mountain-road drive with director Christopher McQuarrie trailing in a helicopter, then “we’d jump in another helicopter, and Tom would fly us back through a canyon at about 100 feet. You’re just thinking, ‘What? How did this happen?’” Though he professes shock, what happened was fairly simple: “I love Shaun of the Dead,” Cruise says of the 2004 zombie classic Pegg starred in…

ON THE MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE SET, they call her Pom Cruise. Director Christopher McQuarrie gave Pom Klementieff the nickname, a nod to her impressive stunt prowess. Asked how that comparison felt, Klementieff breaks into a huge smile and answers in her elegant French-accented English: “It feels f---ing great!” Her character, a nearly wordless assassin when she was introduced in Dead Reckoning, shares a name with Leonard Nimoy’s IMF agent in the television series: the Great Paris, a magician and master of disguise. But this Paris enters as a killer who seems to relish her work as much as her Adam Ant-inspired military getups and face paint. Yes, that’s her with the maniacal grin steering an armored truck down the Spanish Steps, then fighting Ethan Hunt while wearing a Tartan miniskirt and…

Vanessa Kirby ALANNA MITSOPOLIS ARMS DEALER A “high-level underground con artist” is how Kirby (above, in M:I-6) describes her character, also known as the White Widow. A philanthropist and socialite, she was to the black market born, the daughter of Max Mitsopolis. Her seductive charm masks fluid loyalties, and Ethan Hunt falls for her. But can she love any person more than she loves closing a deal? Vanessa Redgrave MAX MITSOPOLIS ARMS DEALER Mission filmmakers “love British talent,” says Hayley Atwell. Setting the bar for highbrow supporting players was Vanessa Redgrave in the first M:I. The Oscar winner (above, with Karel Dobrý as a bodyguard) feasted on the part of the glamorous criminal. Admit it: Like Hunt, you were expecting Max to be a man. Jon Voigt JIM PHELPS…

THE SIZZLING FUSE, the self-destructing tape, the mask-ripping identity reveals, the pulsating theme music and, of course, the Impossible Mission Force, a team boasting elite if unconventional espionage skills. The key elements were in place when Mission: Impossible debuted on CBS in September 1966, a new offering from Desilu Productions. (The studio, founded by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, had just days earlier launched another new series: Star Trek.) Amid a spate of James Bond-inspired spy films and TV shows, this one stood out. Creator Bruce Geller brought the tick-tick-tick tension and antihero con men of jewel-heist movies such as Rififi (1955) and Topkapi (1964) that were his inspiration to Mission. It would run for seven seasons on the strength of its central twist: “We were bad guys, not good…

The IMF has nabbed a terrorist, but he won’t give up the Syndicate’s nuclear plans until his manifesto is broadcast. Ethan makes a call, and instantly Wolf Blitzer is reading the unhinged copy on CNN. Or is he? Minor Fallout spoiler: The anchor is, in fact, Benji (Simon Pegg) on closed-circuit TV. The scene required a Blitzer mask—and the man himself to play Benji impersonating him. Blitzer, who grew up in Buffalo watching Mission on TV, happily flew to the London set. “The last time I had been in a motion picture was the James Bond film Skyfall, a scene where I was just reading the news,” he says. “This one I really had to do a little acting.” (He had previously stretched for a role in high school,…

Tom Cruise is moving through London. He’s moving through London, and he’s talking. He’s moving and talking, then suddenly—he’s gone. “Tunnel,” he explains. He resumes talking, keeps moving. From the time a 21-year-old Cruise slid across the floor on his socks in Risky Business, motion has propelled his stardom. He is famous for doing bar-raising, hair-raising stunts and for running onscreen in just about every movie he’s made, all for our entertainment. (Does he even like running?) Cruise is in England to complete postproduction on the film he wants most to talk about, Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, and to act in another, which he can’t yet talk about. He is a producer on both. So he’s busy. But if there is a way to get him to slow down, even…

THE YEAR: 1994. THE EVENT: the New York City premiere of Pulp Fiction. The place? We’ll let Tom Cruise tell it: “I remember I was in the men’s room, and Ving walks in.” As crime lord Marsellus Wallace, Ving Rhames was the breakout star of Quentin Tarantino’s early-career masterpiece. “I was like, ‘Hey, man, I just really admire your work…. I’d love to have you in Mission: Impossible,’” recalls Cruise. “And he said, ‘Sure, just call my agent, and send the script over.’” Rhames had his own memory of the meeting: “For whatever reason, we’re the only two there,” he told Australia’s Spotlight Report. “He says something to me. I was at the urinal, and I turned and almost peed on the floor because it was Tom Cruise!” At the…

IT IS AN IMPORTANT if somewhat thankless role: that of the highly placed official who casts withering doubt on the Impossible Mission Force and the unorthodox methods of its members, particularly Ethan Hunt. Who wants to be the person who uses her considerable charisma and authority to deliver such ego-puncturing indictments as “The IMF is Halloween, a bunch of grown men in rubber masks playing trick-or-treat”—only to be shown up in the end and forced to admit: “The world needs the IMF”? But this was part of the job when Angela Bassett stepped into the role of Erika Sloane, head of the CIA in 2018’s Mission: Impossible—Fallout. And she is fine with that. “It’s like instruments, a part of an orchestra,” says Bassett, speaking to People from her home in…

No one knows Mission: Impossible’s daredevil sequences better than Wade Eastwood, the series’s stunt coordinator since Rogue Nation. What sets M:I apart is that the hardest-working stuntman on-set is also the star: Tom Cruise. Beyond bragging rights, having Cruise do his own action serves the storytelling. “You’re with him on the whole journey,” says Eastwood. “You’re not cutting to a stunt double or to a wide shot and disconnecting from that emotional character moment.” Off-camera, the two men are friends, and “we’re out having fun, BASE jumping, speed flying,” he says. “But in the movie he’s got to be Ethan Hunt.” Eastwood, whose work can also be seen in, among others, Interstellar and the last two Men in Black films, says (without naming names), “I work with a lot of…

MOST TV AND FILM composers have at least a scene or a script to start their work with. Lalo Schifrin was given just the description of an image: Each episode of the new CBS spy thriller he was hired to score in 1966 would begin with a close-up of a match striking and lighting a fuse. After his initial effort—a tense military march called “the Plot”—was rejected because producers wanted something more “dramatic,” he had a chance to watch the show’s pilot and realized, he later explained to Britain’s Independent, that the opening theme “had to be like a call to the viewers to watch. What I needed to compose was like a logo for Mission: Impossible.” Mission accomplished. The theme of the TV show, which has been revived in…