Rock of Ages Film Star Tom Cruise on Comparing Action Movies to Musicals: 'They All Have Their Risks'

Tom Cruise may scale the world’s tallest building for the latest installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise, but the Oscar-nominated actor faced a different set of challenges when prepping to play Stacee Jaxx in the upcoming film adaptation of Rock of Ages: singing and dancing.

“They all have their risks,” Cruise told the Los Angeles Times, comparing action film stunts to performing in a musical. Cruise opted to accept the role of an 80s rocker in the upcoming Adam Shankman-directed film thanks to his wife, Katie Holmes. “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 [Tropic Thunder character] Les Grossman doing hip-hop. And then to take it to this level with [Rock of Ages]? It was really fun.”

Cruise placed himself on a rigorous rehearsal schedule as he simultaneously prepped for the movie musical while finishing filming Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. “I was singing five hours a day and I was dancing five hours a day,” the actor said. “Adam [Shankman] 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, helped me with the choreography.”

The Rock of Ages movie, scheduled to hit theaters June 1, 2012, also stars Diego Boneta, Julianne Hough, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Russell Brand, Alec Baldwin, Mary J. Blige, Paul Giamatti, Malin Akerman and Bryan Cranston.