Los Angeles, May 14 (IANS): Director Christopher McQuarrie has confirmed that stars Rebecca Ferguson, Ving Rhames, Vanessa Kirby and Simon Pegg will be returning to the Tom Cruise-starrer "Mission: Impossible" franchise, for two upcoming instalments.

McQuarrie made the news official during his virtual appearance with Pegg and new cast member Hayley Atwell and composer Lorne Balfe on the podcast "Light The Fuse", reports hollywoodreporter.com.

Ferguson, Rhames and Kirby will reprise their characters of Ilsa Faust, Luther Stickell and Alanna Mitsopolis, or the White Widow, respectively.

"Mission: Impossible 7", which also marks the return of Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, was being shot in Venice when the shutdown directive was issued due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Now, McQuarrie is spending his days on Zoom calls working with the department heads for the seventh film.

"We're going to take this opportunity to make the movie better in prep than we've ever had a chance to do before," said McQuarrie.

McQuarrie also shared that there is one major casting, which still remains a mystery.

"There is someone we were talking to before the world blew up," he said, adding: "An actor I was very excited about. I don't know where that is, because we had talked days before (the shutdown) and it was an incredibly exciting casting coup."

McQuarrie did an uncredited rewrite on "Ghost Protocol" in 2011. He penned and directed "Rogue Nation" in 2015 and "Fallout" in 2018.

In the podcast, he opened up about his decision to divide the next adventure chapter of Hunt's life into two films.

"When we went into making ‘Fallout', I said to Tom, 'I really want to make this more of an emotional journey for (Cruise's character Ethan Hunt)'," he said, adding: "Going into this, I said, 'I want to take what we learned from Fallout and apply it to every character in the movie. I want everyone to have an emotional arc. ... I just want the movie to have more feeling across the board."

He recalled: "We realised we had a movie that was two hours, 40 minutes long. And every scene in it was necessary."

"The ending of the first movie snapped into place. We knew what the ending was and we knew what the beginning was. And now I had these two sequences, which means, I've got 40 minutes of ‘Mission: Impossible 8' figured out," he added.

The director also touched upon the reports that Cruise will soon be filming a movie in space.

"Am I involved in that movie? There's absolutely nothing I can tell you about that movie," he said, adding: What is happening in 7 and 8 is so insane that we don't need to go to space."