For Tom Cruise, everything is a learning opportunity — from flying planes to dancing and playing the piano.

“I will learn a skill, and I know eventually I’m going to use it in a movie,” the screen icon says in a rare magazine interview for PEOPLE’s special issue about the making of the Mission: Impossible franchise.

Cruise, 62, says he learns dance “because I’m interested in that art form. The teachers understand how to move a body, what the shape does and the emotion it can create in others.”

Cruise is “constantly training” in a variety of skills, in fact, “whether it’s the piano or having more time to dance. Or parachuting or flying airplanes or helicopters. The wonderful thing is you’re never there. It can always be better.”

As far as his aptitude on the piano, he adds, “I wouldn’t say ‘play.’ I enjoy hitting the keys… I find it relaxing.”

Given his death-defying daredevilry as star and producer of the Mission: Impossible movies since 1996, relaxing is a necessity for Cruise.

The $4-billion-and-counting franchise, which repurposed the ’60s spy series best remembered for its groovy theme song, has continued to raise the wow factor on stunts that Cruise performs himself: scaling the face of the world’s tallest building, climbing in and out of flying helicopters, launching from a motorcycle off a clifftop.

In his eighth and possibly last installment, The Final Reckoning, in theaters May 23, Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt hangs from and crawls along the wings of a 1940s-era biplane zooming above South Africa’s Drakensberg mountain range.

“I remember seeing old footage of wing-walking,” says Cruise of a stunt he’s envisioned trying since he was a kid. “Those aircraft were only traveling at, I don’t know, 40, 50 miles an hour. This aircraft is up to over 120 miles an hour. Going out there, I was realizing that it takes your breath away.”

“Anytime you see Tom in the plane, he’s at the controls,” says director Christopher McQuarrie, who has helped helm every Mission film since 2015’s Rogue Nation and co-wrote the seventh and eighth installments with Erik Jendresen. “He’s basically a one-man film crew: operating the camera, acting and flying.” 

Of Cruise’s mind-boggling aerial sequences, stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood tells PEOPLE, “Everyone will think we did some on green screen on the ground. I guarantee there was not one single shot that was not on a plane flying for real.”

How does an actor prepare before attempting such a high-flying stunt? “I actually eat a massive breakfast,” reveals Cruise. “The amount of energy it takes — I train so hard for that wing-walking. I’ll eat, like, sausage and almost a dozen eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and fluids. Oh, I’m eating! Picture: It’s cold up there. We’re at high altitude. My body is burning a lot.”

Though gripping a military plane taking off in Rogue Nation remains Cruise’s least-safe stunt — his late mother, he recalls, saw footage and said, “Oh, honey, I’m so glad you didn’t fill me in on that one beforehand” — another feat in Final Reckoning came close.

The team built a massive water tank to film a submarine interior that could tilt and rotate 360 degrees, tumbling Cruise and everything inside like a front-loading washer.

And to be able to feature his unobstructed face in a SCUBA mask, the Oscar nominee breathed his own carbon dioxide.

“You’re not going to feel as connected with the character if I went with a regular mask and a thing in my mouth to breathe,” he explains. “Luckily when you’re flying jets you train for hypoxia and for carbon dioxide buildup. You start to be able to perceive your body and how it’s reacting so that I knew when to stop.”

“If we knew what it took to do it, we would not have done it,” says McQuarrie of that underwater sequence. It’s something of an ethos for this most action-packed of franchises, as Cruise says: “On Mission, if it was easy, I guess we wouldn’t want to do it.”

But even after eight rounds of risking life and limb to play Ethan Hunt, the actor-producer adds he “always” has moments of awe and gratitude. “I love making movies. It’s not what I do. It’s who I am.”

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning will premiere at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It also stars Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, Greg Tarzan Davis, Hannah Waddingham, Nick Offerman and Angela Bassett.

Pick up PEOPLE’s new special Mission: Impossible issue, with exclusive cast interviews and behind-the-scenes photos, available now.