Josh Holloway says his all-too-brief appearance in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol was much longer — and way more dark and tragic.
Holloway played IMF agent Trevor Hanaway in the cold open of the 2011 film. During the sequence, Hanaway was gunned down by an assassin (Lea Seydoux) and died in the arms of his lover and fellow IMF agent Jane Carter (Paula Patton).
While in the completed film Hanaway perished relatively quickly, the original cut included a wildly different scene.
Revealed Holloway to Sirius XM’s The Julia Cunningham Show, “In the original script, Paula Patton comes out and finds me dying, but I’m not dead yet. 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.”
Continued Holloway: “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 Paula because she revives you to get information, and then lets you die again, and you’re supposed to be in love.’”
Holloway’s comments come as the latest Mission: Impossible entry, The Final Reckoning, is set to have what’s expected to be the biggest opening box office weekend of the franchise.
The actor is making the publicity rounds in support of his new Max series Duster where he plays a getaway driver for the mob in the 1970s.
In talking to The Hollywood Reporter, Holloway recently discussed his time away from acting during a rough period for the actor.
“I must have thrown the penny over the wrong shoulder and broke a mirror while I did it, because I had a hard seven years,” Holloway said. “Just hard — nothing was coming through. I had to focus on my family. I learned piano. I did all sorts of different things. I started telling my agents, ‘Just bring me work, I need to get out of house, it’s ridiculous, I only work for the Holloways now and I need to do something.’ They started sending me random scripts. A lot of them that were not good projects that I had to pass on, but some came through.”
Then J.J. Abrams — who was also a producer on Ghost Protocol — called with the offer to star in Duster.
“He called me out of the blue and immediately was like, ‘You got a minute?’” he recalled. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I think I got a minute, J.J. Abrams!’ He launched into pitching me this show and I couldn’t even believe what I was hearing. He said, ‘You’re a wheel man for the mafia in 1972” — and I had a hard time focusing on anything else he said after that. It was that old Jerry Maguire moment — ‘You had me at ‘hello.’”
