Tom Cruise is well-known for doing his own stunts, and like its predecessors, his newest film — “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation” — is action-packed with jaw-dropping derring-do.

The film’s trailer features Cruise and his new female co-star, Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson, 31, jumping off the top of the Vienna Opera House.

Like Cruise, Ferguson chose to do her own stunts in this film, and the leap off the Vienna landmark took place on the first day of shooting. “I wrapped my legs around Tom Cruise and swore every bad word in the dictionary,” she recalls by phone. “He smiled and said, ‘Are you ready?’ I said, ‘Go for it.’ ”

During the six weeks that led up to the jump, Ferguson had practiced regularly in a harness, gradually working up to the height of the Opera House roof. That was challenging, in part because she has vertigo. However, once they started shooting the jump in Vienna, she was OK.

“We must have done it 10 to 15 times, and I wanted to do more and more,” Ferguson says. Cruise told her it involved a 120-foot free fall.

“MI 5” marks the first time Ferguson has done stunts of this magnitude, and it’s quite a change from her earlier work. She was nominated for a Golden Globe in 2014 for her portrayal of Elizabeth Woodville in the BBC miniseries “The White Queen.”

When she was called in for “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation,” she was on location in Ouarzazate, Morocco, shooting “The Red Tent,” the TV miniseries based on Anita Diamant’s best-selling novel. “I was on a camel called Barbie when they called and said, ‘Tom wants to meet you in London in 17 hours,’ ” Ferguson says.

She flew to London for the meeting, knowing that she would have to fly right back to Morocco to continue shooting “The Red Tent.” That appointment was the first time she’d met Cruise.

“I walked in the room, and there he was — in black jeans, a black T-shirt and a golden smile,” she says. The meeting was “mostly a chemistry test to see how we got along.”

The test went well, and Ferguson was added to the cast. “All these characters have something, and for me to come in and deliver something to the established cast — it’s quite intimidating, and lovely as well. You just have to go with the flow, ride the wave…,” she says.

Ferguson plays Ilsa, a mysterious assassin who joins Hunt in his efforts to defeat the Syndicate. She refers to her character’s signature offensive gambit as the “killer thigh move.”

“It was the stunt director, Wade Eastwood, who came up with it,” she explains. “He asked me, ‘How do we create an exciting technique for your character?’ because I’m smaller and needed graceful attacking moves.” What he came up with allowed the actress to draw on dance moves to help with the stunts.

But most of them required additional training. “I’ve always liked moving, running, jumping. It didn’t come naturally. It wasn’t easy. Doing a stunt movie is hard, hard work,” she says.

Now Ferguson is gearing up for two more projects. One is “Despite the Falling Snow,” a Cold War story about a female spy who falls in love with a politician in Moscow, slated for release later this year.

The second is “Florence Foster Jenkins,” which stars Meryl Streep in the title role of the socialite-opera singer, and Hugh Grant as her manager, St. Clair Bayfield. Ferguson plays Bayfield’s wife.

When she isn’t working, the actress is happy returning to her fishing village in Sweden. “I’m very lucky. I can do what I love and go home and read stories to my child,” she says.