Long before Tom Cruise was hanging from airplanes or launching motorcycles off cliffs, Mission: Impossible was a hit CBS television series built around teamwork, deception, and elaborate undercover operations. The original show premiered on Sept. 17, 1966, with Steven Hill leading the first season as Dan Briggs alongside Barbara Bain, Martin Landau, Greg Morris, and Peter Lupus.
According to Remind, Peter Graves joined the series in Season 2 as Jim Phelps and soon became one of the faces most closely associated with the franchise. He remained through the rest of the original seven-season run and returned when television revived the series in 1988. So when Hollywood brought Mission: Impossible to theaters in 1996, several members of the Mission Impossible original cast were unhappy with what the new movie did to the world they had helped create.
Peter Graves Hated What the Movie Did to Jim Phelps
The 1996 film introduced Tom Cruise as IMF agent Ethan Hunt while Jon Voight took over the role of Jim Phelps. At first, the movie appeared to use Phelps as a bridge between the classic series and its big-screen successor. Then came the twist: the trusted team leader had betrayed his own agents, helped orchestrate their deaths, and tried to frame Ethan before dying near the end of the movie.
Graves strongly objected to the change. He had always considered Phelps an American hero and could not imagine portraying him as a villain. Rather than turning the character into a traitor, Graves thought filmmakers could simply have created someone new for Voight to play. He even suggested that the movie could have briefly explained that his version of Phelps had retired, preserving the character fans remembered.
Other Original Stars Felt the Reboot Lost the Show’s Identity
Graves was hardly alone. Greg Morris, who played electronics expert Barney Collier throughout the original series, reportedly walked out of the movie before it ended and later condemned the new version. Martin Landau also disliked an earlier concept that would have brought members of the old team back only to kill them off as the story progressed.
For the Mission Impossible original cast, the issue went deeper than nostalgia. The television series revolved around an ensemble working together to outsmart its targets through carefully planned schemes. The movie shifted much of that attention toward Ethan Hunt as an individual action hero, beginning the transformation of the franchise into the stunt-heavy blockbuster series audiences know today. Sixty years after the original show premiered, the divide between the two versions helps explain why some of its earliest stars never embraced Hollywood’s very different mission.