WILLIAM DONLOE RETURNS? CHRISTOPHER McQUARRIE SHARES THE NEWS ON INSTAGRAM
Christopher McQuarrie shared some casting news for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part Two, which is currently in production for a planned 2024 release. At the tail end, he shared a photo of Rolf Saxon, who played William Donloe in Brian De Palma's 1996 film. Drew Taylor at The Wrap is ready for it:
A legacy character is returning to the “Mission: Impossible” franchise and it’s probably not who you’d expect.On social media, writer/director Christopher McQuarrie just announced that Rolf Saxon, the actor who played unlucky CIA agent William Donloe in Brian De Palma’s 1996 masterpiece “Mission: Impossible” will be returning for the eighth film, “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part Two” (due out in the summer of 2024).
If, for some reason, you don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of the franchise, in the first movie Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team, then comprised of Luther (Ving Rhames), Krieger (Jean Reno) and Claire (Emmanuele Béart), stage an audacious break-in at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. This involves sneaking into the “black vault,” an ultra-secure CIA database overseen by William Donloe, an analyst at the agency. It’s Donloe’s vault that Hunt infiltrates by suspending himself from the ceiling, in what is arguably the most memorable sequence from the original movie – and maybe the entire franchise.
When IMF director Kittridge (Henry Czerny, who will also be returning for the sequels) finds out about the heist, he contemplates Donloe’s fate before deciding: “I want him manning a radar tower in Alaska by the end of the day; just mail him his clothes.” Considering McQuarrie and other members of the cast and crew have been sharing photos of an icy tundra, it begs the question – has he been in Alaska all this time? And what does Ethan and his current band of spies want with Donloe today?