Looks like Alec Baldwin will be drawing on whatever CIA knowledge he picked up playing Jack Ryan in **The Hunt For Red October **back in 1990, as he’s now being recruited to play the head of the agency in **Mission: Impossible 5.
Christopher McQuarrie wants Baldwin for the role, although he hasn’t yet chosen to accept the assignment. Assuming he signs on the dotted line, he’ll join Tom Cruise and a cast that likely includes Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner and franchise good-luck charm Ving Rhames for the fifth outing of the venerable action series. This time it promises to do explosive things to London, among other locales. He's not the only person that Cruise and McQuarrie are targeting: Rebecca Ferguson, who you might have seen on TV's The White Queen, is set to play a femme fatale.
Baldwin's also in talks for Will Smith’s latest, the still-untitled drama about the real-life controversy of head injuries in American football. Peter Landesman is overseeing that one, adapting Jeanne Marie Laskas’s magazine article about a doctor who fought to have the truth about cranial injuries come out.
In other Baldwin news, he’s considering a return to TV, developing a new comedy that would see him play a larger-than-life, corrupt and weird mayor of New York based on controversial Toronto politician Rob Ford. Wells Tower is on board to write that one, with the backing of NBC productions.
The actor will next be seen in Cameron Crowe’s still-untitled Hawaii-set romantic comedy drama, which arrives here on March 13. He’s also worked on Warren Beatty’s new film about Howard Hughes.