HHeterogeneous face recognition (HFR) aims to identify a person from different facial modalities such as visible and near-infrared images. The main challenges of HFR lie in the large modality discrepancy and insufficient training samples. In this paper, we propose the Mutual Component Convolutional Neural Network (MC-CNN), a modal-invariant deep learning framework, to tackle these two issues simultaneously. Our MCCNN incorporates a generative module, i.e. the Mutual Component Analysis (MCA) [1], into modern deep convolutional neural networks by viewing MCA as a special fully-connected (FC) layer. Based on deep features, this FC layer is designed to extract modal-independent hidden factors, and is updated according to maximum likelihood analytic formulation instead of back propagation which prevents over-fitting from limited data naturally. In addition, we develop an MCA loss to update the network for modal-invariant feature learning. Extensive experiments show that our MC-CNN outperforms several finetuned baseline models significantly. Our methods achieve the state-of-the-art performance on CASIA NIR-VIS 2.0, CUHK NIR-VIS and IIIT-D Sketch dataset.