It’s only been a little more than a year since Tom Cruise last took on an impossible mission in Fallout, but the magical bullshit of Scientology isn’t going to implicitly endorse itself, so Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie are already setting the stage for the first of their next two death-defying Mission: Impossible movies—which, as we previously reported, are coming in 2021 and 2022. We didn’t know anything about these sequels at the time, beyond the safe assumption that they will feature Tom Cruise risking his life by performing ridiculous stunts that are definitely more ridiculous than the last movie (which, as a refresher, involved Cruise jumping across a rooftop and destroying his ankle in real life and holding on to a big bag of some sort as a helicopter lifted it into the air), but now we do know literally one additional thing: Hayley Atwell will also be there, either as some new ally, a terrorist mastermind, or someone who pretends to be a new ally but is actually a terrorist mastermind. (Come on, nobody actually believed that Henry Cavill’s character was a good guy, right?)
This comes from The Hollywood Reporter, which got the scoop from McQuarrie’s Instagram page. We don’t know who Atwell will be playing, but this is a nice return to the business of larger-than-life spy operations for her. After all, she is best known for playing Agent Peggy Carter in the Marvel movies and the Agent Carter TV show, and her brand of espionage involved just as many costume-changes and shoot-outs as Ethan Hunt’s average mission. Also, maybe Jeremy Renner’s character will finally come back to the Mission: Impossible franchise this time, and he can talk to Atwell about how they’re both friends with Captain America.