From 2012, Rock of Ages, where Tom plays Stacee Jaxx
Gallery Link:
Movies > Rock of Ages > BluRay Screen Captures
Tag: Rock of Ages
Tom Cruise goes all out rockstar in the June issue of W magazine! The photoshoot is up at the gallery and you can read the full interview at WMagazine.com or below below:
Rock of Ages star Tom Cruise is strumming his way to the hall of fame.
It’s a Thursday afternoon in a studio in Los Angeles, and Tom Cruise, dressed in jeans and an untucked white button-down shirt, is Âbelting out “Paradise City.†He’s performing the Guns N’ Roses song—which he sings during the opening credits of his new movie, Rock of Ages—in character, as Stacee Jaxx, a fading rock god from the eighties. Sitting in front of the glass-enclosed recording booth are Cruise’s music advisers, including Ron Anderson, formerly a vocal coach for Axl Rose, whose trademark screech Cruise has perfected. When Cruise started this project more than a year ago, he didn’t know whether he could really sing. “Adam Shankman, the director, asked me if I could carry a tune,†Cruise tells me later. “I said, ‘We’ll see, won’t we? This is either going to work or it’s going to be dreadful.’ â€
Throughout his career, Cruise has assessed roles by their degree of difficulty. He loves a challenge—especially if it involves mastering some new skill. Cruise has tossed bottles (Cocktail), flown fighter jets (Top Gun), hustled pool (The Color of Money), learned to live life as a Nazi with one arm and an eye patch (Valkyrie), raced cars (Days of Thunder), and, most recently, rappelled down the face of the tallest building in the world (Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol). He always works from the outside in: Even in his serious, Academy Award–nominated roles for Born on the Fourth of July (in which he was wheelchair-bound) and Magnolia (where he played a sex guru), his way into a character is through the physical. With Stacee Jaxx, he began with the mundane rock-star requirements—honing his newly discovered four-octave range and learning to play the guitar—but the physical soon gave way to the emotional. While everyone else in Rock of Ages is either ridiculous or playing their part with a wink (Alec Baldwin in a wig!), Cruise seems to actually be living in Stacee’s leather pants. He is alone inside another, much more interesting movie; there is a melancholic undertow to Stacee Jaxx—he’s only truly alive when he’s onstage, and he knows that his time there is nearly over.
Continue reading
Rock of Ages will be in theaters in less than a month! I can’t wait! Here’s a video and the movie poster is up at the gallery
And Mary J. Blidge’s video “Any Way You Want It”
Joblo.com has posted the Rock of Ages trailer! I can’t wait for this movie!
Tom Cruise risked life and limb filming action sequences at the top of the world’s tallest building for “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol,” but he said that wasn’t any scarier than the singing required for his first musical, the just-wrapped “Rock of Ages.”
“They all have their risks,” Cruise said with a laugh of playing rocker Stacee Jaxx in Adam Shankman’s adaptation of the Tony-winning 2006 musical, which featured songs by jukebox heroes such as Bon Jovi, Styx, Journey and Pat Benatar. Among the tunes Cruise belts out in the film: “Pour Some Sugar on Me.”
Shankman is coming off the foot-tapping success of “Hairspray,” while Cruise, inspired by his dance-loving wife, Katie Holmes, is taking a true genre gamble even as he celebrates the 30th anniversary of his first screen appearances (“Endless Love” and “Taps” both came out in 1981). The action star said Holmes’ influence is also why he added some memorable dance-floor moves to his Hollywood agent performance in “Tropic Thunder.”
“I had started dancing because I was inspired by my wife. She kept saying, ‘You’ve got to do a musical sometime,’ ” Cruise said. “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. And then to take it to this level with this? It was really fun.”Shankman has said Cruise is a natural and has music in his genes thanks to an opera singer in his family tree. The filmmaker has shown a flair for the unexpected: Shankman pulled a signature performance from John Travolta in his gender-flipped role in “Hairspray.” So perhaps “Rock of Ages” will be one of Cruise’s acclaimed “experiment” roles, such as in “Magnolia,” “Collateral” or the aforementioned “Tropic Thunder” — even if the sight of the bare-chested, long-maned Cruise as Jaxx has already been jeered across the Internet.
The actor said he’s just pumped to be working with Shankman.
“He’s on fire,” Cruise said. “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.”
The cast of “Rock of Ages” also includes Diego Boneta, Julianne Hough, Russell Brand, Alec Baldwin, Mary J. Blige and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and much of the heavy lifting for the shoot was done in South Florida. Cruise said his singing and dancing work there was a different challenge than his “Mission: Impossible” job swinging out windows atop the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, but in some ways more stressful.
“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,” Cruise said. “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.”
“Rock of Ages” hits theaters in June.
Source: LA Times
