Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning: Some Details On New Characters

The Mission: Impossible series has been introducing and bringing back characters from previous films for years now. Since the third movie, the franchise has become much less about one agent and instead about the team that Ethan has built around himself. If the box office is anything to go by, that was the smart move. For Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, we are getting seven new characters, including a new villain played by Ozark's Esai Morales. Director Christopher McQuarrie teased Morales's character in an interview with Entertainment Weekly while confirming that he will play a part in Part One and Part Two.

"I can tell you that he's definitely the antagonist in our story, or rather he is one of the antagonists in our story," says McQuarrie of Morales' character. "He's something of an enigma. You discover more about him over the course of the two movies. There's definitely more to him than meets the eye, and he's something of a ghost of the past."

"The less I tell you about Hayley Atwell, the better," says McQuarrie. "Hayley represents a stranger in a strange land — she's somebody who does not come from this world, she's not a spy, she's not an agent. If anything, she's an agent of chaos and is something of a random element that's thrown into this story."

While that might be the case, we got at least some idea of Atwell's character in the footage screened at CinemaCon last month. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is also bringing back some names from previous movies, including Vanessa Kirby's arm's dealer White Widow and Henry Czerny, who played the former IMF director Kittridge, whose character hasn't been seen since the first Tom Cruise film that was directed by Brian De Palma in 1996.