Mission Impossible 6 Deleted Scene: Would Tom Cruise have been a bad guy?

There is a moment during the Mission: Impossible — Fallout trailer when Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) holds Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) back from attacking someone.

Stickwell says: “Ethan! That’s not who we are!”

Ethan replies: “Maybe we need to reconsider that.”

This same dialogue is in the movie, as part of a very clever manoeuvre to trick a terrorist into revealing his plan.

But does a Mission Impossible 6 Deleted Scene reveal Tom Cruise could have been a bad guy?

One of the things which makes Ethan Hunt such a loveable superhero is his unflappable moral compass.

This moral code is also what allows Hunt to survive through the direst straits of Fallout, which see the biggest challenge of his career.

But director Christopher McQuarrie revealed Hunt’s moral compass almost broke.

During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, McQuarrie said the line almost foreshadowed a dark moment for Hunt, where he would assume the identity of the monster he was chasing, compromising his values in the process.

Mission Impossible 6 showed Hunt and August Walker (Henry Cavill) fighting a terrorist in the bathroom of a French nightclub.

They’re supposed to subdue him and assume his identity.

McQuarrie’s initial idea for the movie went like this: “The whole idea was to assume the identity of John Lark… without the mask.

“That was gonna be the plot of the whole movie: Ethan assumes the villain’s identity but looks like himself.”

“[H]e must go on convincing people that he is the villain, which forces Ethan to have to do darker and more horrible things in pursuit of his aim, the first of which was breaking Lane out of prison.

“That was eventually going to take Ethan down a very dark path, all of which Tom really embraced, and which I pursued for a very long time,” McQuarrie said.

Eventually, this character arc was abandoned as it started to affect other characters and to detract from the action which audiences expect from a Mission: Impossible movie.

Whether they filmed the rest of that Hunt goes bad scene in Mission: Impossible 6 remains to be seen.

But with the proliferation of bonus feature DVDs and digital downloads, if the clip exists it’s likely we’ll see it at some point in the future.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout is now playing in cinemas.