Tom Cruise passes the bar

In Top Gun he was an ace pilot, in The Color of Money, he was an expert pool player, and now, in his upcoming film Cocktail, Tom Cruise goes behind the counter to play star bartender Brian Flanagan, who works the Manhattan watering holes in spring and summer and spends his winters in the tropics.

Making the movie Cocktail

Filming seven days a week in Jamaica, Cruise found that the island “wasn’t exactly paradise.” One of his more difficult days was spent filming a love scene at a jungle waterfall with actress Elisabeth Shue.

“Those scenes are always awkward,” he says. “But it was cold, and we were in the water, and I was freezing.” Cruise wound up getting sick. “It’s not quite as romantic as it looks,” he says. “It was more like ‘Jesus, let’s get this shot and get out of here.’ Actually, in certain shots you’ll see that my lips are purple and, literally, my whole body’s shaking.”

Cocktail will open this summer.

Cruise is now shooting Rainman with Dustin Hoffman, and he finally plays someone who’s not on top of the world. “He’s self-destructive, angry, resentful of the world,” Cruise says of his character.

“Hippy Hippy Shake” scene from Cocktail

Here, Tom Cruise (Brian Flanagan) and Bryan Brown (Doug Coughlin) mix drinks at the bar in a zany, super-choreographed kind of way.