We watched Mission: Impossible 3 last night, and I was astounded when **Keri Russell’s ** character, after saying 5 lines (4 of them were the single word “Ethan”) died. After that, there was one flashback scene and one "video"of her, bringing her up to a whopping 14 or 15 lines, and that’s counting sentences and single words as lines.
She was given a HUGE amount of publicity for this movie. She was all over the red carpet. I thought she had a giant part right next to Tom Cruise in the movie. I definitely saw more of her face splashed all over the TV and magazines for this movie than, say, Michelle Monaghan’s or Maggie Q’s or Bily Crudup’s, for God’s sake, and those actors had a HELL of a lot more lines and importance in the movie than she did.
Then, to my astonishment, she was featured prominently in the “special features” portion of the film. She was interviewed. I did not see any of the other actors, save Ton Cruise and Philip Seymour Hoffman, interviewed. You’d swear those three actors had equal parts in the movie!
She didn’t get that much publicity. Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames and Michelle Monaghan all did the morning show circuit, but Keri Russell wasn’t even offered.
As for the special features section, all of the major actors had lengthy interview segments on the Electronic Press Kits, but they weren’t all very interesting.
In addition to the JJ Abrams explanation (in five to seven years, Evangeline Lilly will be in the same boat) there’s the possibility that Russell actually had many more lines, but that they were left on the cutting room floor in the late edit.
This is actually a fairly common occurrence. A really good example is The Thin Red Line, in which George Clooney was initially heavily pitched as one of the film’s stars. But after the bloated initial shoot was cut to theatrical length, Clooney’s entire role was cut to one short and unimportant scene.
I got the sense right away that Russell’s role was supposed to be much larger. There was clearly a history between her character and Ethan Hunt’s - there’s no other reason for the flashback scene - that was sort of left hanging. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there were at least one or two other Russell scenes.
I thought Keri Russell handled her action scenes pretty well and I was disappointed that her character died so early. They ought to have MI:4 take place before the events of MI:3 and feature her more prominently.
I don’t recall any publicity for Keri Russell when MI3 was released to theaters. The current publicity for the DVD release hardly even shows Tom Cruise.