MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

Simon Pegg looks back on the past 20 years of the Mission: Impossible franchise, and teases the likelihood of getting the band back together for just one more Cornetto movie...

- By Nick Reilly

When Simon Pegg landed the role of Benji Dunn in Mission: Impossible III, he wasn't entirely convinced that his casting - as a convivial British agent and a lovable gadget dealer for Tom Cruise - would go the distance.

“It’s been 20 years since I first went onto set and it’s been a long road,” Pegg reflects over coffee on a rainy April morning in Soho. “I didn’t really think this role was anything major when I did it. I thought it was a bit of stunt casting off the back of Shaun of the Dead, but here we are.”

Here we are indeed. The job was Pegg’s first taste of Tinseltown and marked the start of a journey that would see him chalk up the kinds of jobs that - as he told Lauren Laverne on Desert Island Discs - his childhood self would look at with “utter amazement”. Spielberg regular? Check. A fan-favourite turn as Scotty in JJ Abrams’s celebrated Star Trek movies? Check. And a small cameo in Star Wars? You've guessed it...

But it is Mission: Impossible that marks the longest and certainly one of the most significant roles of Pegg’s career. Back in 2005, it was the first indication that this affable everyman from Shaun of the Dead was suddenly a big deal. Twenty years later, he has grown to become a major part of the franchise as Tom Cruise’s right-hand man on screen and as his friend off it. Cruise, for instance, christened him “Eight-Pack Peggles” after he showed off a ripped body transformation in 2019.

But as far as Mission: Impossible is concerned, there’s the palpable sense that all good things must come to an end. The latest instalment hits our screens at the end of May, and a sub-title like Final Reckoning doesn’t seem particularly open-ended. Similarly, you’d imagine that its gut-busting runtime of nearly three hours could tie up some loose ends pretty definitively. So, is it really the end?