When Rolf Saxon first auditioned to play William Donloe in Brian De Palma’s 1996 “Mission: Impossible,” he didn’t think he had gotten the role of the bumbling CIA analyst who is outsmarted by Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt during a break-in at Langley headquarters.

He waited an hour and a half for De Palma, who then saw him for just five minutes. Saxon figured that was it. But not only did he get the role, making him a crucial player in what would become an iconic scene, he’s now back playing that same character nearly 30 years later in “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.” It’s a return that distinctly raises the profile of the self-described “jobbing actor,” who spent the past 10 years mostly doing theater in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“When this came along, it was like, ‘Wow, are you kidding?’ ” he said in a video interview. “This is fantastic. This is a nice little cherry on top.”

In the first film, Donloe has only a few minutes of screen time. He’s a working stooge who is poisoned by Ethan’s team in its quest to steal a list of covert agents off his computer housed in a secure vault. While Donloe goes back and forth to the bathroom to throw up, Ethan drops down from a ceiling vent to pull off his caper. When Donloe returns to the vault, he finds a knife on his desk and realizes he messed up big time. His fate is sealed by Kittridge, the Impossible Mission Force official, who says, “I want him manning a radar tower in Alaska by the end of the day.” Donloe’s main role is collateral damage.

But according to “Final Reckoning” director Christopher McQuarrie, Donloe made a big impact. In fact, he said in an interview, fans frequently asked him when he was going to bring the character back. For a long time, he didn’t understand why Donloe engendered such love, until he heard the question framed in a different way: “When is the team going to do right by what they did to Donloe?”

“And I realized why William Donloe resonated,” McQuarrie said. “There was a perceived injustice, whether anybody could put their finger on it or not.”

So when McQuarrie and his co-writer, Erik Jendresen, were working out the story for “Final Reckoning,” they hit on where to use Donloe: Members of Ethan’s team, including Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Benji (Simon Pegg), have to trek to the Arctic to determine where a sunken submarine is located. In a tiny but cozy home in the middle of nowhere, they find Donloe. He has, indeed, been manning a radar tower.