Mission: Impossible 7 Is Bringing Back Angela Bassett’s CIA Character

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Mission: Impossible 7 Is Bringing Back Angela Bassett’s CIA Character

Angela Bassett says she's coming back as CIA director Erika Sloane for Mission: Impossible 7, and is just waiting for the call to shoot her scenes.

Mission: Impossible 7 is bringing back Angela Bassett's CIA director Erika Sloane. After facing delays due to the Covid pandemic, the seventh Mission: Impossible movie is back to filming, with Tom Cruise once again putting life and limb on the line to deliver thrills to audiences.

Very little is known about the plot for Mission: Impossible 7 (secrecy is of course expected with such a major franchise), but leaks have provided a few glimpses of the action being concocted for the latest installment in the on-going adventures of globe-trotting secret agent Ethan Hunt. Indeed, a recent set photo teased one of the movie’s big fight scenes, showing Cruise’s co-stars Hayley Atwell and Esai Morales getting into a scrape. Another recent leak showed Cruise himself rehearsing one of his signature stunts as he jumped between water taxis in a Venice canal (Venice is central to the film’s action, and in fact at one point there were concerns the movie would not be able to go ahead with its planned plot due to a major Covid outbreak in Italy).

Much of Cruise’s team of Mission: Impossible 7 castmates has already been revealed, with series regulars like Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson and of course Ving Rhames all on-board, and now there’s news of another returning actor from a previous film in the series. Speaking to ComingSoon about her upcoming Disney film Soul, Bassett revealed that she is set to reprise the role of Erika Sloane in another Mission: Impossible adventure. She said:

“The real conversation is when, I think they’ve begun filming, or that was the plan, but you know in these trying times, the best laid plans of mice and men sometimes go awry. But I do have the pages, we’ll just see when I get the ticket to fly and go do my part, but that’s coming up and I’m really excited about it.”

Of course Mission: Impossible 8 has already been planned to go into production following Mission: Impossible 7, but given that Bassett mentioned having script pages and being ready to go, it’s likely she’s talking about returning for the currently underway seventh film. Bassett made her debut in the action thriller franchise in Mission: Impossible – Fallout, playing CIA director Erika Sloane, who was responsible for putting Henry Cavill’s August Walker on Ethan Hunt’s trail (not knowing that Walker was actually a member of the villainous band known as The Apostles). Bassett obviously has a deep resume beyond Mission: Impossible, including her Oscar-nominated performance as Tina Turner in What’s Love Got to Do With It. Besides another go-around in the Mission: Impossible universe, Bassett’s slate of upcoming action movies includes the Karen Gillan-led thriller Gunpowder Milkshake.

It remains to be seen what exact role Bassett’s Erika Sloane plays in the next Mission: Impossible, but at the end of the last one, she had come around on Ethan Hunt and the IMF after initially mistrusting Hunt’s rogue ways and sending August Walker to watch him. It’s of course possible that Sloane could actually end up leading the IMF, after Alec Baldwin’s Alan Hunley made his own jump from CIA chief to IMF head (there is indeed an opening after Hunley died at August Walker’s hands in Fallout). The only thing that’s certain about Mission: Impossible 7 is that Ethan Hunt will find himself in incredible danger, and will defy death at every turn in order to save the world from another huge and mysterious threat (with some help from his friends).