But singing and dancing, it appears, may have proven to be the most difficult thing of all for the actor who just recently did his own stunt work atop the tallest building in the world for the upcoming GHOST PROTOCOL. Here’s Cruise talking to the LA Times’ 24 Frames about his experience leading up to and shooting ROCK OF AGES:
“I had started dancing because I was inspired by my wife. She kept saying, ‘You’ve got to do a musical sometime.’ Kate’s a dancer, so she would say, ‘Let’s go to dance class,’ and she would take us and that’s how I kind of came up with the idea of Les Grossman doing hip-hop [for TROPIC THUNDER]. And then to take it to this level with this? It was really fun.
“I was working on it when I was finishing ‘Mission’ and I was singing five hours a day and I was dancing five hours a day. Adam said, ‘Look, we’re going to have a lot of fun,’ and we really did… I did six months preparing for the movie, and all my stunt training and all of those years doing that, it helped me with the choreography.”
Cruise also sang director Shankman’s praises:
“He’s on fire. What he accomplished with ‘Hairspray’ was amazing. My daughter has seen it 15 times and our whole family has watched it over and over and it’s just enormously entertaining. To be able to hold that tone throughout is really something.”
This is seriously going to be such a strange film, one that’ll either prove to be a fun and entertaining experimental role for Cruise, or quite simply a disastrous one. Whichever it turns out to be, though, I will be seeing it.
ROCK OF AGES opens June 1, 2012.