When Rolf Saxon first auditioned to play William Donloe in Brian De Palma’s 1996 “Mission: Impossible,” he didn’t think he had gotten the role of the bumbling C.I.A. analyst who is outsmarted by Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt during a break-in at Langley headquarters.
He waited an hour and a half for De Palma, who then saw him for just five minutes. Saxon figured that was it. But not only did he get the role, making him a crucial player in what would become an iconic scene, he’s now back playing that same character nearly 30 years later in “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.” It’s a return that distinctly raises the profile of the self-described “jobbing actor,” who spent the past 10 years mostly doing theater in the Bay Area.
“When this came along, it was like, ‘Wow, are you kidding?’” he said in a video interview. “This is fantastic. This is a nice little cherry on top.”
In the first film, Donloe only has a few minutes of screen time. He’s a working stooge who is poisoned by Ethan’s team in its quest to steal a list of covert agents off his computer housed in a secure vault. While Donloe goes back and forth to the bathroom to throw up, Ethan drops down from a ceiling vent to pull off his caper. When Donloe returns to the vault, he finds a knife on his desk and realizes he messed up big time. His fate is sealed by Kittridge, the Impossible Mission Force official, who says, “I want him manning a radar tower in Alaska by the end of the day.” Donloe’s main role is collateral damage.
But according to the “Final Reckoning” director Christopher McQuarrie, Donloe made a big impact. In fact, he said in an interview, fans frequently asked him when he was going to bring the character back. For a long time, he didn’t understand why Donloe engendered such love, until he heard the question framed in a different way: “When is the team going to do right by what they did to Donloe?”
“And I realized why William Donloe resonated,” McQuarrie said. “There was a perceived injustice, whether anybody could put their finger on it or not.”
So when McQuarrie and his co-writer, Erik Jendresen, were working out the story for “Final Reckoning,” they hit on where to use Donloe: Members of Ethan’s team, including Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Benji (Simon Pegg), have to trek to the Arctic to determine where a sunken submarine is located. In a tiny but cozy home in the middle of nowhere, they find Donloe. He has, indeed, been manning a radar tower.
When Saxon, 69, first got wind that McQuarrie wanted to meet with him on a video call, he thought that a friend was playing an elaborate prank.
“I didn’t get dressed up,” he said. “I had just a T-shirt. And then I clicked it and there’s McQ. And it’s like, ‘What?’”
Sure, when watching the many sequels — he’s seen them all — he occasionally thought of Donloe, “Why not bring him back?” However, he had no idea that the character had become such a beloved figure.
“In fact, when Chris told me that, I thought it was a way of getting me to do it,” he said. “I thought he was being nice and generous.”
For McQuarrie, enlisting Saxon was something of a risk. He was completely unfamiliar with the actor’s work beyond his few beats in “Mission: Impossible.” But although Saxon has never been a recognizable movie star, he considers himself lucky in his career.
“I’ve made a living out of it for my whole life,” he said. “That’s something many people can’t say.”
Born in Virginia and raised in California, Saxon moved to Britain to study at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He spent 32 years in that country, a fact you can tell by his light mid-Atlantic accent with a slightly British lilt. In addition to “Mission: Impossible,” he had small roles in “Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and “Saving Private Ryan” (1998). For a number of years he was the narrator for “Teletubbies.” Around 2010 he settled in Northern California, where his theater work included the 2018 premiere of “Eureka Day,” which would go on to Broadway.
But acting has also brought Saxon some heartbreak. Over the years he has been cut from multiple films, either partly or entirely. He was worried that would happen again with “Final Reckoning.”
“I said to Chris that if that’s going to happen with this one, I begged him to just let me know,” he said. “Don’t let me find out at the end of the day. And he just looked at me, ‘Like, that’s never going to happen.’”
In the summer of 2023, after he shot his initial scenes, Saxon got a call from McQuarrie and braced for the worst. But the director was not getting in touch about axed scenes. Instead, he was informing him that they wanted him to come back to work. They had added him into the last section of the movie.
“We wrote a small part for him, and we just kept expanding, it kept growing,” McQuarrie said. “I called Tom and I said, ‘You know, I think we’re doing ourselves a disservice if we let this character leave the movie midway through.’ Tom said, ‘I completely agree; he should be there in the third act.’”
Saxon was nervous when he first got to set, but he said Cruise, whom he had interacted with only briefly during the first movie, quickly put him at ease.
“He gave me a big smile, a big hug,” he said. “We spent a couple minutes chatting. It was like I was a long-lost friend.”
To prepare to return as Donloe, Saxon imagined what would have happened to him in the decades since we last saw him. He didn’t try to recreate his physicality from back then, but he put himself in the mind-set of someone who had essentially been exiled.
“I look at my career 30 years ago and where it is now, and in Donloe’s case there’s a fundamental difference,” he said. “He didn’t make this choice, and working with that is fascinating for me.”
Saxon is reluctant to make parallels between his arc and Donloe’s, but there are similarities. Both have been elevated from bit player in Ethan Hunt’s story to a major part of his world. For McQuarrie that’s a testament to Saxon’s performance, which has always been the reason Donloe stood out. (The puking, Saxon said, was added after De Palma saw him making people laugh during downtime on set.)
“There’s a humor, there’s a dignity, there’s a resourcefulness, and what I love is how this character who is an Everyman becomes utterly essential to the story,” McQuarrie said.
Though McQuarrie expects Saxon to become a newly hot commodity upon the release of the film, the actor is keeping his expectations in check.
“It’s a little bit early to be saying, ‘Oh my God I’m going to be a big star,’” he said. “We’ll see.”
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