IMF Team in Mission: Impossible: Every Member Explained

The IMF team is a shifting group of specialists built around Ethan Hunt, and no two films field exactly the same line up. In Mission: Impossible (1996), directed by Brian De Palma, the team is led by Jim Phelps (Jon Voight). By Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011), directed by Brad Bird, it is a small unsanctioned crew of Hunt, Jane Carter, Benji Dunn and William Brandt. By Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025), directed by Christopher McQuarrie, it is a mixed group of old allies and newer recruits.

The pattern is easy to follow once you see it. Ethan is the field lead, Luther Stickell is the technical anchor who keeps coming back, and each film adds a fresh specialist (a pilot, a thief, an analyst) to cover whatever the mission needs. Think of it like a long running television crime ensemble, where the faces rotate but the working relationships stay recognizable. Below, each member and recruit is covered by story, and the final section explains how the agency itself works. For the full cast list, see Mission: Impossible cast, and for the wider group of heroes and villains, see Mission: Impossible characters.

Ethan Hunt is played by Tom Cruise in every film, and he is billed first each time. He starts as a team member under Jim Phelps in the Prague mission of Mission: Impossible (1996), where nearly everyone around him is killed and he is suspected of being the mole. By Mission: Impossible III (2006), directed by J.J. Abrams, he has moved into training new recruits and is engaged to a nurse named Julia who does not know his real job.

From Ghost Protocol onward he is the one holding the team together, even when the IMF has been shut down around him. In Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015) he is a fugitive after the Senate dissolves the agency, and by Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) he is hunting the two halves of a cruciform key tied to the Entity. The constant is the physical stunt work, and the Burj Khalifa climb in Ghost Protocol is one that Cruise did himself.

Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) leads the IMF team in Mission: Impossible (1996), and he is the reason Ethan is on the Prague mission at all. The team is sent to watch a meeting and stop Alexander Golitsyn from selling a list of covert agents, and the operation collapses with Ethan as the only survivor in the field.

Phelps turns out to be alive and to be the real traitor, working with his wife Claire (Emmanuelle Béart) and the operative Franz Krieger (Jean Reno). Ethan sets a trap on the train to Paris, and Phelps dies when the helicopter he and Krieger escape in is destroyed in the Channel Tunnel. His legacy returns decades later, because in The Final Reckoning the agent Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham) turns out to be Phelps's son.

Luther Stickell is the technical specialist played by Ving Rhames, and he is with Ethan in the first film and again in the last. In Mission: Impossible (1996) he is one of two disavowed operatives Ethan recruits, alongside Krieger, to break into CIA headquarters at Langley, where Ethan is lowered by wires into the secure vault.

He returns in Mission: Impossible II (2000) to back up the Sydney operation, and in Ghost Protocol he is the one who hands Ethan a new mission briefing at the close. In The Final Reckoning he supplies the malware known as the Poison Pill, and he sacrifices himself to limit a nuclear blast after Gabriel traps him with a bomb. His farewell message plays near the end of the film.

Benji Dunn is played by Simon Pegg and first appears in Mission: Impossible III. By Ghost Protocol he is a tech specialist who helps break Ethan out of a Moscow prison alongside Jane Carter, and he joins the Kremlin break in to identify the figure called Cobalt.

In Rogue Nation Ethan draws Benji into the plan to stop the Syndicate at the Vienna opera, and Benji secretly copies the data that the team steals from the underwater vault in Casablanca, which later becomes the locked file that forces Ethan's hand. He is kidnapped and wired to a bomb in the London finale. In Dead Reckoning he meets up with Ethan after the speed wing escape, which shows how reliably he turns up where Ethan needs him.

Ilsa Faust is played by Rebecca Ferguson and enters in Rogue Nation, where she helps Ethan escape the Syndicate after he is captured and tortured. Her loyalty is unclear for much of the film, because she works under her MI6 boss Atlee and passes the stolen ledger to him, but she names the Syndicate's leader as the rogue British agent Solomon Lane and kills Janik Vinter in the London finale.

In Fallout she is cleared of suspicion after Ethan stops the last bomb at the Kashmir site. In Dead Reckoning she gives Ethan one half of the key in the desert, and he fakes her death to shield her from a bounty. She is killed by Gabriel at Alanna Mitsopolis's party in Venice. Dead Reckoning presents her as Ethan's former partner and ally.

Mission: Impossible II (2000), directed by John Woo, builds a one film team in Sydney around two outsiders. Billy Baird (John Polson) is the pilot Ethan gathers alongside Luther to back up the operation, and Nyah Hall (Thandiwe Newton) is the skilled thief who used to be the rogue agent Sean Ambrose's lover.

Nyah agrees to get close to Ambrose again and passes Ethan a memory card showing that the Chimera virus has a dormant period of about 20 hours. When Ambrose's men discover her betrayal, she injects herself with the last virus sample and urges Ethan to kill her to stop it spreading. He refuses, and Luther and Billy find her on a cliff, ready to end her life, before Luther injects her with the cure. The IMF clears her criminal record in return for her help.

Lindsey Farris (Keri Russell) dies in Mission: Impossible III when a small explosive planted in her head goes off. She is Ethan's former student, and the IMF pulls him out of retirement because she has been seized while tracking the arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

Ethan and his team rescue her, but the device in her head goes off and kills her. The clues she leaves behind point to Davian's search for a dangerous item called the Rabbit's Foot, which drives the rest of the story. Her death is the moment that ends Ethan's quiet life and makes the mission personal, and it sets up the device that Davian later places in Ethan's own head.

Jane Carter (Paula Patton) and William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) are the two new faces of Ghost Protocol, the unsanctioned team that forms after the Kremlin bombing. Jane is the agent who breaks Ethan out of a Moscow prison with Benji, and she later gets the override code from the media tycoon Brij Nath in Mumbai. Brandt is the analyst who joins the Dubai operation, where Ethan climbs the outside of the Burj Khalifa as part of the plan.

Brandt is the one to stay. He returns in Rogue Nation as William Brandt, and in Ghost Protocol's closing scene he tells Ethan that his wife Julia is alive. Fans can follow his later arc on his own page, Brandt in Mission: Impossible.

The newest members of the team arrive across Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning. Grace (Hayley Atwell) is a skilled thief who steals the first key half from Ethan in Abu Dhabi, and she ends up on his side after the chase across Europe. Paris (Pom Klementieff) tells Ethan how the key connects to the Sevastopol in Dead Reckoning, and the team frees her at the start of The Final Reckoning. Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) is recruited in the same film.

By the end of The Final Reckoning, Grace traps the Entity before it can launch the nuclear weapons, and she hands Ethan the drive that contains it. The team then goes its separate ways. The villain they face, Gabriel, dies in a crash after the biplane chase.

Kittridge (Henry Czerny) is an institutional hardliner, not a villain, and the films use him as a pressure point on Ethan rather than a threat to the world. In Mission: Impossible (1996) he is Ethan's superior, suspects him of being the mole and sends him running. Kittridge later arrests the arms dealer Max and recovers the list, and Ethan and Luther are cleared.

In Dead Reckoning he is the CIA director who admits he placed the bounty on Ilsa Faust, and Grace takes the key from him while he is acting as the buyer. He appears again in The Final Reckoning. Whether that makes him a good guy depends on which film you are watching.

Ethan's two clearest romantic storylines are with Julia and Nyah Hall. Julia (Michelle Monaghan) is the nurse he marries in a hurry in Mission: Impossible III, and Davian kidnaps her to force Ethan to hand over the Rabbit's Foot. She appears to be shot but is alive, and in the end she shoots Musgrave, the traitor inside the IMF, and revives Ethan before the couple leave on their honeymoon.

In Fallout she is Ethan's ex-wife, and Walker threatens her during the chase to the Kashmir site. Ethan makes peace with her, and she has moved on with a new life. Nyah Hall (Thandiwe Newton) is the thief he refuses to sacrifice in Mission: Impossible II, and after Ethan kills Ambrose the two take a vacation in Sydney. Ilsa Faust is a close partner, though the films treat her as an ally rather than a romance.

The IMF is a separate agency from the CIA, but the films keep forcing the two together. IMF stands for Impossible Missions Force, and it answers to the US government: in Ghost Protocol the US President disavows it under the protocol that gives the film its name, and in Rogue Nation the CIA director Alan Hunley convinces a Senate committee to shut it down and fold it into the CIA. The committee reinstates the IMF at the end of that film, so the answer to the question is no, although it is only barely no.

In my opinion, that tension is what keeps the team interesting. A group that is trusted one film and dissolved the next has to rely on loyalty to each other, not on the badge, and that is why Luther, Benji and Ilsa feel like the true members while the CIA figures feel like weather. On Kittridge, I think it could be argued he is a good guy who is wrong more often than he is right: he hunts Ethan in 1996 and puts a bounty on Ilsa in Dead Reckoning, but he is not trying to end the world. My pick for the most important member after Ethan is Luther, because he is on the team in Mission: Impossible (1996) and again in The Final Reckoning. For a first watch, start with the Mission: Impossible movies in order.