Tom Cruise wished he didn’t kill off Emilio Estevez’s character in the first Mission: Impossible movie.

In the 1996 movie, directed by Brian De Palma, Estevez played IMF agent Jack Harmon, the gadgets guy who gave Cruise’ Ethan Hunt the explosive chewing gum (“hasta lasagna, don’t get any on ya”).

Jack perished in the line of duty — he was impaled in an elevator.  Estevez’s performance wasn’t credited — and for good reason.

Speaking to Uproxxx, the Breakfast Club actor said: “The way Tom had explained it, he said, ‘Look, I’d love for you to come and join the cast. The whole opening number where everybody gets wiped out, it’s going to be a lot of well-known people and all of them are going to go uncredited and it’s really going to set up the level of peril for Ethan.’

“And I said, ‘I’m in. You don’t have to ask me twice, I’m in.’ And then afterwards, obviously, the movie’s a giant hit.”

That was when Cruise realised he made a bad call on Jack’s premature demise.

Estevez said, “Tom was like, we were doing a run the year after that and he says, ‘Man, we made such a mistake killing you off.'”

Cruise tried to resurrect Jack in Mission: Impossible II but nothing came out of it.

“He and [director] John Woo were trying to figure out a way to bring me back for Part Two, but it just didn’t make sense,” he said. “I thought you could have because with all the masks, right?”

Estevez and Cruise go back a long way. They’d known each other since childhood; they both attended the same school, Santa Monica High. As actors, they went to the same auditions. They starred in Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 teen gang drama The Outsiders. Cruise did a cameo in 1988’sYoung Guns, the Western starring Estevez as outlaw Billy the Kid.

Mission: Impossible went on to spawn seven sequels, with the final two chapters, Dead Reckoning Part One, due July 13, and Part Two, slated for June 2024.

Photos: TPG News/Click Photos

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