Did Tom Cruise really just do that? This reaction pretty much goes for any action sequence Ethan Hunt charges into. How the hell is he going to get out of this one? Sure enough, he figures it out. The face of Mission: Impossible belongs to Hunt and Cruise, that’s a given. Then there are the beloved members of the Impossible Mission Force: Luther (Ving Rhames), who has been a loyal ally since the start, and Benji (Simon Pegg), who may be clumsy but persists in being active in the field. Since Rogue Nation (2015), a new face steals the show every time they appear. The IMF should be thankful this mysterious late addition is on their side. Even if you don’t know whose side she’s on, you know she can swiftly take down her opponents. Faster than you can say, “Your mission, should you choose to accept,” MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) has become the best character in this franchise.

‘Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation’ Introduces a New Spy, but Who Does She Work For?
Image via Paramount Pictures

The Vienna assassination attempt in Rogue Nation is operatic, visually, and quite literally. It’s perfect Hitchcockian suspense, where director Christopher McQuarrie clearly lays out where everyone and everything is for a stronger audience reaction. Ethan must stop a sniper, following one killer before seeing another, hidden and ready to take the shot. This sequence is not only a terrific action sequence, it portrays just how stealthy that other assassin is. Ilsa Faust puts together a rifle within the ornate shadows of a tower set. The golden gown she wears will help her slip into the crowd once her target is hit, for this moment it creates an alluring image. Ilsa is a beautiful, deadly woman, but not everything is what it seems with this MI6 agent.

It seems at first Ilsa Faust is a traditional femme fatale, a devious woman who uses and discards those around her for her own gain. The Mission: Impossible movies aren’t strictly film noir stories, though they tend to use the moody subgenre for influence. The opera sequence is an example of this, dressing Ilsa Faust in a gown and shadows. Her shifty motives do their part to confuse Ethan as to what her end goal is. Not until the last half of Rogue Nation does the movie confirm Faust is an ally, working as a modern update to the femme fatale. She is Ethan’s equal and her affections toward him were never a ruse. To develop the character further, Faust can handle herself better than some of the other women in the series. Julia (Michelle Monaghan) shouldn’t need to know how to fight for survival or how to help disarm a nuclear weapon, her relationship to Ethan forces her into these situations. In the first Mission: Impossible (1996), Claire (Emmanuelle Béart.) tried to help her traitor of a husband, to then be abruptly killed by him in the end. Ferguson’s spy is a new kind of female character in this series. With Ethan, movie fans and his closest allies know where his loyalties are. He is never an enigma, unlike Ilsa.

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What Makes Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa an Excellent Expert Killer?
Image via Paramount Pictures

“You should go before things get ugly,” a captured Ethan tells her when they first meet. There is no need for that. She can be deadly working in the shadows or face-to-face. Rebecca Ferguson keeps up with Cruise in the action choreography, getting her own fighting style. If she is smaller than the men who approach to kill her, she uses her whole body, especially her legs, to disarm. During a pivotal action sequence, Ilsa needs to complete a mission by stealing a digital ledger from IMF. She knows there’s a growing infatuation between Ethan and her, she smartly takes advantage of it. To end a high-speed Casablanca chase, Faust stands in the road, causing Ethan to swerve and crash. He’s injured, but his survival threatens Faust’s mission. The terrorist Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) sees this as a weakness. In actuality, this is one of her strengths.

She is a dedicated MI6 operative with morals. Deep undercover with the Syndicate, she is gaining Lane’s trust when Ethan enters her life. In Rogue Nation alone, she goes on to protect him many times, putting her own life and mission in jeopardy. For a rather unsurprising revelation, Ilsa and Ethan learn how little they matter to their respective agencies. The two are disposable, and in the case of MI6 Director Atlee (Simon McBurney), he has a much darker, selfish agenda for not pulling Ilsa out of the field like she desperately wants. “We can be anyone. We can do anything. It’s only a matter of going,” she tells Ethan in a personal request for them to escape. It feels so human in a franchise where the characters often perform superhuman feats. Having Ilsa be the one to voice this to Ethan, is a good enough detail to see which of these two truly desire to leave behind their spy life. In Fallout (2018), Mission: Impossible lets go of a self-contained format to continue the story of the Syndicate, and best of all, Agent Faust. This time around, there are other dominant women who hold their own in the sixth installment.

Director Christopher McQuarrie explained to Collider how they have evolved in the series: “Women can be in peril. Ilsa is in peril, but I was really afraid to put Ilsa in peril in this movie, because I thought, now I’m gonna hear, ‘Ilsa was really great, then you put her in peril. You made her a damsel in distress.’ Well, yeah, but she gets herself out. And Benji’s in distress, and other people–Tom’s in distress in the last movie. So we created for ourself simple rules by which it’s a how do you give these characters agency in a movie in which they’re not the protagonist?” Angela Bassett is a CIA Director with blunt agency tactics on how to protect the world. Vanessa Kirby gives “White Widow” Alanna a menacing dead-eye stare that can put anyone on edge. Among them, Ilsa Faust remains the most intense and complicated figure. Fallout doesn’t keep the mystery going whether the IMF can trust Faust — yes, they can — so it switches around the dynamic between Ethan and herself.

Why Are the ‘Mission: Impossible’ Heroes Lucky to Have Ilsa Faust on Their Side?
Image via Paramount Pictures

Early on, Ilsa accidentally kills Lark, an arms dealer she was supposed to be protecting, in order to protect Ethan. It’s such a reflex, she doesn’t realize what she’s done until the aftermath. “Shit,” is the only thing she can mutter. To fix her mistake, she teams up as “Lark’s” bodyguard when Ethan takes on the identity. “You should have stayed out of the game,” he tells her afterward. “You should’ve come with me,” she replies. During the Paris car chase, it’s Ilsa who loses this time by holding off shooting into the car Ethan is driving. This gives enough time for him to drive right into her, to keep Solomon Lane alive. Not long after the hit-and-run, the two have a clandestine meeting. An emotional score by Lorne Balfe plays while the spies walk through the Jardin du Palais Royal, closing the distance among themselves, for a scene absent of explosive threats. The tension between them is enough.

Ethan deduces Ilsa’s motives, talking aloud as she nods, her eyes widen, or her head shifts to confirm the answers. She then sadly warns, “I will get to him one way or another. Please don’t make me go through you.” It doesn’t sound like a threat though, there’s too much pain and restraint in how Ferguson delivers the line. The passion between the two would be enough to power their scenes, but it works greater by having Ilsa Faust be Ethan Hunt’s equal, with slight differences. Fallout sees the mess the IMF can get into because of Ethan’s morals. He can’t let Luther die, and the plutonium gets stolen because of this. Ilsa makes her own tough decisions. In the finale, she strangles Lane, while Benji hangs from a noose not far from her. For a few seconds longer than Ethan would have, Ilsa knocks out Lane before she finally saves Benji.

Ilsa & Ethan’s Relationship Make Missions More Dangerous & Exciting
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Luther ends up being the one to tell Ilsa what Ethan won’t. “He’s only been serious about two women,” he begins, describing how it went with Julia. “Every time something bad happened in the world, Ethan would think, ‘I should’ve been there.’ And she would wonder, ‘Who’s watching the world while Ethan’s watching me?’ Deep down, they both knew that someday, somehow, something truly terrible was going to happen all because they were together.” Luther knows what’s going on between the agents, thanks to a detailed drawing Ethan made of her in Rogue Nation. “And he cares about you more than he can admit,” Luther continues. “That’s one more worry than he can handle right now. If you care about him, you should walk away.” It’s the best advice he can give as the team heads out to stop multiple nuclear bombs. The possibility of failure is high. Except, Ilsa is stubborn, telling Ethan when he walks in, “I’m coming with you.” Hunt’s face, as Cruise plays it, changes from frustration to acknowledgment that it was always going to be this way. “I know,” he answers. They can’t deny it, they are inseparable.

“We are never free,” she mentions to Ethan. Will this always be the case? In Dead Reckoning, Ilsa will face danger again, along with the IMF. They will fight to stop the next disaster and this being Mission: Impossible, it’ll probably be avoided in the nick of time. Should Ilsa not make it out alive, it would be a shame, but in no way will Rebecca Ferguson’s legacy in the spy movies be lost. Each of the entries has turned out better than the previous ones, a rarity for a long-running franchise, and this goes for the new addition in Ferguson. Better late than never, Agent Faust.