Tom Cruise Tried to Bring Back This Dead 'Mission: Impossible' Character

The Big Picture

• Emilio Estevez's character Jack Harmon in Mission: Impossible was killed off early, leaving fans wanting more.
• Tom Cruise regrets killing off Jack Harmon and considered bringing him back for future movies.
• The Mission: Impossible series has a history of forgetting about its IMF characters, leaving fan-favorite roles behind.

For nearly thirty years now, Tom Cruise has been wowing audiences everywhere with death-defacing stunts as Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible series of action films. Based on the original television series from the 1960s, Mission: Impossible was relaunched as a film series in 1996, and we've been thrilled ever since. But every once in a while, a character appears in the Cruise-led series that never returns. Sometimes they're written off, and sometimes they are killed, and in the case of Emilio Estevez's Jack Harmon, we've never quite forgiven the franchise for killing him off in the very first movie.

Mission: Impossible

An American agent, under false suspicion of disloyalty, must discover and expose the real spy without the help of his organization.

Emilio Estevez Played a Break-out Character in the First 'Mission: Impossible'

When the first Mission: Impossible starts, Ethan Hunt (Cruise) works as an agent directed by his friend and mentor Jim Phelps (played by Jon Voight, who takes over the role from Peter Graves in the original series) with the Impossible Mission Force (IMF). But when Ethan's team is suddenly killed all around him, our favorite IMF agent is forced to clear his name and uncover the web of conspiracy that threatens to trap him. But one member of Ethan's original team stands out above the rest, one who died way too soon. Estevez's Jack Harmon is the team's resident tech guru and controls the elevators during their fateful mission in Prague. Sadly, it's the only field action the character ever gets.

We don't get to see too much of Estevez in Mission: Impossible. His character is killed in the very first act and the actor isn't even credited on-screen (either in the opening or in the end credits) for his part in the film. While Estevez doesn't get any billing for his work here, Jack's companionship with his IMF team, and Ethan in particular, helps establish the tight-knit bond between the largest IMF unit we've ever seen in the film series. The way the actors play it, these guys are a sort of make-shift family, and it's arguably the happiest we ever see Ethan Hunt until he meets Julia Meade (Michelle Monaghan) a few movies later. While Simon Pegg's Benji Dunn took over the role of "the tech guy" in future installments, Estevez's Jack was the first man behind the computer screen. He and Ethan are clearly close, and Jack's sudden and brutal elevator death affects the IMF agent deeply.

Along with Jack, agents Sarah Davies (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Hannah Williams (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) are killed on the same Prague mission. As it turns out, their team leader, Jim Phelps, and his wife Claire (Emmanuelle Béart), are the ones behind the betrayal, and though Ethan survived to take the fall, he too was eventually supposed to die. Thankfully, with the help of Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), Ethan clears his name and the rest is history, but his team is still dead, and that means no sequel for Jack Harmon. Sadly, Emilio Esteves never returned to Mission: Impossible, which is a tragedy since the actor was pretty popular at the time, with movie series like The Mighty Ducks and Young Guns––the latter of which ironically killed Tom Cruise in a brief cameo role.

Tom Cruise Regrets Killing Jack Harmon in the First 'Mission: Impossible'

According to Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise personally asked him to take on the role of Jack Harmon in the first Mission: Impossible. "The way Tom had explained it, he said, “Look, I’d love for you to come and join the cast. The whole opening number where everybody gets wiped out, it’s going to be a lot of well-known people and all of them are going to go uncredited and it’s really going to set up the level of peril for Ethan," the actor told Uproxx in 2023. He also noted that he didn't even think twice about joining the cast, and jumped aboard as soon as possible. Estevez and Cruise had become friends years earlier while filming The Outsiders, though the two haven't appeared on-screen together since the 1996 Mission: Impossible.

Estevez later recounted a conversation he had with Cruise a year after Mission: Impossible came out. "'Man, we made such a mistake killing you off,'" Cruise reportedly told him, a sentiment we can't help but agree with ourselves. "He and [Mission: Impossible 2 director] John Woo were trying to figure out a way to bring me back for part two, but it just didn’t make sense," Estevez explained. "I thought you could have because with all the masks, right?" Now all we can think about is how fun it would've been to watch Estevez play Cruise's Ethan Hunt in Jack Harmon makeup––assuming the identity of a dead man would definitely be a smart move, Ethan––but sadly we never got that. Though, Cruise does get to play a disguised Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) in the sequel, pretending to be Ethan Hunt to frame the IMF agent.

With the advent of the artificial intelligence known as the Entity as Ethan's latest opponent, it seems like the odds of Estevez returning to the franchise may be less impossible than before. Henry Czerny already returned as Eugene Kittridge, who hadn't been seen since the 1996 film, in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, and it seems like other familiar faces aren't out of the picture quite yet. Since A.I. can use deep fakes and make Ethan see things that aren't there, perhaps using images of his dead teammates against him would be a powerful motivator for Ethan Hunt's latest adventure. But, speculating aside, Estevez's Jack is a character who has been missed since his untimely death, and before the death of Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) in Dead Reckoning, he was no doubt the biggest IMF fatality.

'Mission: Impossible' Has a Problem With Forgetting About Its IMF Characters

Throughout the Mission: Impossible franchise, we've seen plenty of cast members come and go. Sure, Benji Dunn and Luther Stickell keep coming back for more (and we love them for it), but aside from Ethan's most trusted allies, the only other members of Ethan's IMF team to return for seconds are Ilsa Faust and William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), who hasn't been seen since Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation. Thandiwe Newton's Nyah Nordoff-Hall from Mission: Impossible 2, Maggie Q's Zhen Le and Jonathan Rhys Meyers' Declan Gormle from Mission: Impossible III, and Paula Patton's June Carter from Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol have all been forgotten about by subsequent sequels. And they're not the only ones, Anthony Hopkins and Lawrence Fishburne have yet to return as government higher-ups and IMF directors of years past themselves.

The IMF must have a high turnover rate or something, because Estevez's Jack Harmon clearly isn't the only agent to refuse a future mission. While Estevez has an excuse (being killed off will do that), the other surviving characters haven't found their way back to Ethan Hunt's core team for some reason, which is a crying shame. But since Tom Cruise shows no signs of slowing down, it's always possible that some of these seemingly forgotten IMF stars will make their way back into the world of international espionage. In fact, we hope they all choose to accept a final mission sometime down the line.

Mission: Impossible is available to stream on Paramount+ in the U.S.

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