LIVING UNDER THE RADAR

A Mission: Impossible fan favourite returns 3 decades later — even he’s surprised

- ESTHER ZUCKERMAN

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 CIA 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 theatre in the San Francisco 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 has only 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 realises 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.