When Josh Holloway chose to accept his mission in 2011’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, his character’s fate was scripted differently. The fourth Mission: Impossible movie opens with IMF Agent Trevor Hanaway (Holloway) on the run in Budapest, racing across rooftops and returning gunfire as he leaps over the edge onto an inflatable landing pad. Mission accomplished, he ducks into an alleyway just as his phone pings — an alert showing the face of assassin Sabine Moreau (Lèa Seydoux), the woman who shoots him multiple times and relieves him of a courier bag containing Russian nuclear launch codes.
By the two-minute mark, Holloway’s Hanaway is left bleeding to death in the alley. Later in the movie, a flashback sequence shows Hanaway swiping the file from his mark, moments before IMF Agent Jane Carter (Paula Patton) finds her lover bleeding to death.
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“She left him just alive enough for me to see him die,” Carter tells Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), having joined the mission to stop an extremist code-named Cobalt (Michael Nyqvist), prevent him from detonating a nuclear weapon, and avenge Hanaway.
On Sirius XM’s The Julia Cunningham Show, Holloway revealed that Hanaway had an extended death scene that was scripted and shot, but ultimately cut from the finished film.
“In the original script, Paula Patton comes out and finds me dying, but I’m not dead yet,” the Duster actor said. “And then I start to whisper her the codes and I die. So she has to cut me open, put her hand up in my heart, re-pump my heart, and make me come back alive. Then I tell her the codes, and she lets me die again.”
Holloway continued, “We filmed it. We did that and, after they watched it, they said, ‘It’s just too harsh,’ and, ‘The audience is going to hate [Jane] because she revives you to get information, and then lets you die again, and you’re supposed to be in love.’”
As it plays out in the final cut, Agent Carter reaches Agent Hanaway just in time for one last exchange, with his last words being, “You’re so beautiful. I’m sorry. I should have told you.” Carter eventually gets her revenge on Sabine when she kicks the French contract killer out of a window during a fight on a top floor of the Burj Khalifa.
The Ghost Protocol Blu-ray included 15 minutes of alternate or deleted scenes, but the Hanaway-Carter exchange referenced by Holloway has yet to surface after being left on the cutting room floor. The disc release did include an unused opening of Nyqvist’s villain Kurt Hendricks, who monologues, “In the last 3,500 years, there have only been 230 years of peace on Earth. Man has demonstrated a born impulse to create suffering. So how do we, with compassionate hearts, end that suffering? 70 years ago, man created a solution. We invented the end of the world.”
“We were trying to establish our villain upfront,” director Brad Bird explained in the film’s commentary track of an alternate opening sequence showing Hendricks practicing his speech justifying the use of nuclear warfare. “We had a very different notion of what that would be.”
“He was originally a character who ran scenarios for both the Russians and, unbeknownst to the Russians, also the Americans. And he was sort of being driven crazy by the endless running of scenarios that, basically, all ended with the end of the world,” Bird continued.
The Lost star appeared on The Julia Cunningham Show in an interview pegged to his new HBO Max series, the J.J. Abrams co-created Duster. Holloway was asked about his one-off M:I role as the eighth and final installment, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, hits theaters over Memorial Day weekend.
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