Ethan Hunt

Ethan is point man on Jim Phelps's team for a Prague mission to protect the NOC list, which names the CIA's undercover agents. Everything goes wrong: the team is killed, Phelps seems to fall from a bridge, and Ethan is the lone survivor. Eugene Kittridge of the IMF tells him the operation was a trap to flush out a mole, and now Ethan is the suspect. He escapes by blowing up a restaurant's aquarium.

On the run, he teams up with Phelps's wife, Claire, and two disavowed agents, hacker Luther Stickell and Franz Krieger, to steal the real list from CIA headquarters at Langley. A hotel Bible and the reference "Job 3:14" make Ethan realize the mole is Phelps himself, alive. On the high-speed train to Paris, he unmasks his mentor in front of Kittridge. Phelps kills Claire and flees by helicopter, but Ethan hooks the line to the train and drags it into the Channel Tunnel. In the end, he and Luther are reinstated.

In Sydney, Ethan hunts Sean Ambrose, a rogue agent who used Ethan's face to steal the cure for the Chimera virus. To get close, he recruits thief Nyah Nordoff-Hall, Ambrose's ex, and falls for her. Nyah injects herself with the virus so Ambrose can't use it. Ethan kills Ambrose in a fight on the beach and gets her the cure in time.

Years later, Ethan leaves the field to train recruits and gets engaged to Julia Meade, who knows nothing about the IMF. The death of his former trainee Lindsey Farris at the hands of arms dealer Owen Davian pulls him back in. Ethan marries in a hurry, captures Davian at the Vatican and loses him on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Davian kidnaps Julia and demands the Rabbit's Foot, which Ethan steals in Shanghai. With a bomb implanted in his head, he learns IMF director John Musgrave was the traitor. Ethan kills Davian, Julia kills Musgrave, and the couple leaves on their honeymoon.

Ethan is in a Moscow prison when Benji and agent Jane Carter break him out. The next job is getting into the Kremlin, but a bomb tears through the building and Ethan takes the blame. The President invokes Ghost Protocol: the IMF is shut down and the team is left with no backup, no cover and no resources.

With Benji, Jane and analyst William Brandt, Ethan goes after Kurt Hendricks, codename Cobalt, who wants a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. In Dubai, he scales the outside of the Burj Khalifa. In Mumbai, he stops the missile headed for San Francisco. Afterward, Brandt confesses he was assigned to protect Julia when she was killed. Ethan tells him the truth: her death was faked so she could live safely away from him, and the Moscow prison stint was part of the plan. From a distance, Julia sees him one last time before he takes his next mission.

Ethan uncovers the Syndicate, a network of agents everyone believed dead, and meets Ilsa Faust, an MI6 agent undercover inside it. The CIA manages to dissolve the IMF, and he spends six months on the run, hunting the leader, Solomon Lane, alone. In London, he offers his own life to save Benji and traps Lane in a glass cell. The IMF comes back.

Two years later, Ethan chooses to save Luther in Berlin and lets three plutonium cores slip away. The CIA saddles him with agent August Walker, and the mission forces him to break Lane out. Walker turns out to be the terrorist John Lark and kills IMF Secretary Hunley. It all ends in Kashmir, where Ethan runs into Julia, his ex-wife, remarried and working with a medical team. He flies a helicopter into Walker's, kills the traitor and disarms the detonator. Julia tells him his choices saved the world, and Ilsa stays by his side.

An AI called the Entity escapes from a Russian submarine, and the cruciform key that can control it becomes the most wanted object on Earth. Ethan decides to destroy it. In Abu Dhabi, thief Grace steals his half, and Gabriel appears, a man from Ethan's past tied to the death of Marie, a woman he loved before joining the IMF. That past, shown in flashes, is what led him to the agency.

In Venice, Gabriel kills Ilsa, and Ethan loses the person closest to him. He rides a motorcycle off a cliff in Norway to parachute onto the Orient Express, fights Gabriel on the roof of the train and saves Grace from the cars plunging off a bridge. Mid-fight, he picks Gabriel's pocket and escapes with the complete key.

President Erika Sloane wants the key, but Ethan insists on finishing the Entity. Luther, now ill, has built the Poison Pill to trap it, and dies containing Gabriel's bomb so Ethan can get away. Arrested by Briggs, Jim Phelps's son, Ethan convinces the President to let him go after the Podkova module inside the Sevastopol, at the bottom of the Bering Sea.

He dives to the sub, grabs the module as the wreck slides into the abyss, and is saved by Grace in a portable decompression chamber. In the last act, he chases Gabriel in a biplane, takes back the Pill, watches his enemy die and parachutes down to plug it into the Podkova just in time for Grace to trap the Entity. Afterward he listens to Luther's farewell message, hands the destroyed Podkova to Kittridge and makes peace with Briggs. In Trafalgar Square, Grace gives him the drive holding the Entity, and the team goes its separate ways.

Ethan Hunt was created for the 1996 film: on the TV series, the IMF was led by Dan Briggs and then Jim Phelps. Tom Cruise plays him in every film and is known for doing his own stunts. Outside the movies, Ethan appeared in the 1998 video game, in Mission: Impossible – Operation Surma (2003), voiced by Steve Blum, and in Lego Dimensions, using archive recordings of Cruise.