Tom Cruise Almost Had an Entirely Different Career With a Now Iconic Daytime Role

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Tom Cruise might be one of the biggest movie stars in the world, but he was almost one of the sudsiest stars of daytime television if he had landed this iconic role. It seems that the 61-year-old actor was almost a soap actor on Peacock’s Days of Our Lives. 

Kristin Alfonso, who plays Hope Brady on the now-streaming series (it was formerly on NBC), revealed the shocking news on the Hey Dude…The 90s Called! podcast. After landing the role of Hope, it was time to find a love interest for her character. Bo and Hope Brady became a supercouple, which is the ultimate storyline prize as a soap star, but the role went to Peter Reckell, not the Mission Impossible actor.

Alfonso shared that Cruise was one of the “five or six” actors who were a part of the “final test.” Reckell seemed surprised by that revelation on the podcast. “Oh, Peter you knew that!” she said to her longtime co-star. “Remember when Fran [the late Frances Reid] sat next to him on the plane? On the way back from somewhere, it was Tom and they started talking and she said she worked on Days of Our Lives. And he was like, ‘Oh, I tested for the role of Bo.’” 

Reckell was a little bummed he found this shocking news out in 2023, joking, “I could have been using that for the last 40 years!” Podcast co-host David Lascher chimed in, “This is good bragging rights for Peter.” While Cruise probably commands too high of a day rate to make a Day of Our Lives appearance now, it is fun to imagine what Cruise’s acting career would have looked like in the daytime landscape at the height of the genre’s popularity.

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