Henry Czerny returning to Mission: Impossible franchise

Henry Czerny is reprising his role of Eugene Kittridge in the upcoming instalments of the Mission: Impossible franchise.

Director and writer Christopher McQuarrie announced that the Revenge actor was returning to the franchise for the first time since the 1996 original on social media over the weekend.

"There is no escaping the past... #MI7MI8," he wrote besides a picture of Czerny, who recently appeared in horror-comedy Ready or Not and TV miniseries Sharp Objects.

In the original Mission: Impossible, Kittridge was the director of the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) and hunted down Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt after he believed the agent had gone rogue.
He shared several memorable scenes with Cruise, including one in which the Top Gun star says the classic line, "Kittridge, you've never seen me very upset."

The Mission: Impossible films have generally worked as standalone instalments with a small number of narrative storylines connecting them, but McQuarrie changed this with 2015's Rogue Nation and 2018's Fallout, which he also wrote and directed. In the last outing, Vanessa Kirby's White Widow character was revealed to be the daughter of arms dealer Max, a character not seen since the 1996 original.

Czerny will join other returning castmembers such as Kirby, Rebecca Ferguson, and Simon Pegg as well as newcomers such as Nicholas Hoult, who is reportedly playing the villain, Captain America star Hayley Atwell, Guardians of the Galaxy's Pom Klementieff, and Joker's Shea Whigham.

The seventh and eighth instalments, both written and directed by McQuarrie, are being filmed back-to-back. The seventh will hit cinemas in July 2021 and the eighth will be released in August 2022.