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Tom Cruise wanted to do one thing in the new Mission: Impossible movie — and it didn’t involve jumping out of a plane or piloting a helicopter (although he does do both).

The bulletproof Hollywood megastar needed a proper onscreen reunion with his Mission: Impossible wife Julia (played by Michelle Monaghan).

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The character, who was introduced in Mission: Impossible III and appeared briefly in M:I IV — Ghost Protocol, was left out of the fifth instalment, Rogue Nation.

But when writer-director Christopher McQuarrie started talking to the actor about taking on a sixth Mission in Fallout (which is out on digital now and hits Blu-ray this Tuesday), Cruise wanted the film to revisit Monaghan’s character.

“The very first conversation I had with Tom when we started talking about the movie seriously I asked him, ‘What do you want to do?’ He said, ‘People are still asking me about Julia when I travel around the world promoting these films. I want to resolve that. I want to give them that resolution,'” McQuarrie told the Sun in a recent interview.

“I thought that they did that in Ghost Protocol at the end, but (according to Cruise) it left a lot of unanswered questions. It didn’t tell the story of what happened to them as explicitly as Ving Rhames’ Luther tells it to Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa (Faust) in this movie.”

McQuarrie, who penned the screenplay for Fallout, decided to reinsert Julia in a way that she couldn’t be cut from the finished film. It wasn’t just going to be a cameo; he wanted something more substantial.

“If it was just a little detour, it would be off-story and I knew it could be easily edited out,” he says. “So that’s why I wanted to open the movie with a scene that wasn’t action, but something more inside (Ethan’s) head. By the end, I wanted the audience to know what Ethan is feeling. That takes the whole movie and puts it on a more emotional footing from the very first frame.”

In Fallout, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his IMF team (Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson) are forced to work with a hard-hitting CIA agent (Henry Cavill) in a race to stop a global nuclear threat.