Tom Cruise’s Interview with the Vampire Casting Controversy Was a Pain

Interview with the Vampire filmmaker Neil Jordan pulled off a dream casting coup with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.

But much to Jordan’s chagrin, Cruise immediately found himself at the center of a casting-related nightmare. It wouldn’t be the last time he faced scrutiny over playing an iconic literary character, but his go-round nearly two decades later as Jack Reacher came with one notable distinction.

Jack Reacher series author Lee Child endorsed Cruise’s casting at the time, despite the actor not matching the physical description of his massive ex-Army investigator. It wasn’t until 14 years later, amid the success of Reacher, the hit Amazon Prime series starring 6-foot-3, 240-pound Alan Ritchson, that Child ultimately conceded that readers were right to protest the 2012 and 2016 movies’ lack of fidelity to the title character’s imposing presence.

In the case of Interview with the Vampire, the call came from inside the house. Novelist and screenwriter Anne Rice led the charge against Cruise’s casting as Lestat de Lioncourt, a French theater actor in the 1700s who becomes an immortal vampire. Rice had been tied to the book’s development since the late ’70s, and over the years, she’d envisioned a bevy of names to play the tall, blonde bloodsucker, including Rutger Hauer, Julian Sands, Daniel Day-Lewis, John Malkovich, Tom Hanks and several others.

While Rice later went to great lengths to apologize to Cruise after seeing his performance, even commissioning a two-page spread in various outlets to heap praise on him, Jordan says the circumstances created an unwanted dynamic on set.

“It was a pain in the ass for me as a director, for him as an actor and for the entire production, when the whole world was saying, ‘Oh, you’re wrong,’” Jordan tells The Hollywood Reporter in support of Interview with the Vampire’s new 4K Blu-ray release. “The opposition that Anne Rice took to his casting was an absolute distraction. It wasn’t a welcome thing at all.”

As one would expect, Cruise was fueled by the naysayers.

“When everyone told him he was not the right choice for the part, he liked the challenge of proving them wrong,” Jordan says. “He was just beginning to explore the non-Tom Cruise aspects of himself, and there are a lot of sides to Tom that he has yet to explore, let me put it that way.”

Rice even suggested Cruise and Pitt swapping roles, something Pitt may have been open to in retrospect. Nobody complained when Pitt received the part of Louis de Pointe du Lac, a wealthy plantation owner in the late 18th century whom Lestat would eventually sire after Louis is consumed by grief over the death of his wife and child. But the strain of playing a vampire during a nocturnal production and its unusual makeup process drove Pitt to the brink of asking producer David Geffen how much it would cost for him to vacate the role mid-shoot. (The answer was $40 million.)

“It’s all my fault. We had intense discussions about it. We shot six months at night in New Orleans, Paris and New York. He found it very oppressive in a way that Louis himself found it oppressive,” Jordan shares. “The combination of the part and Brad’s unease about shooting constantly at night — and me hanging him upside down and painting the veins on his face and putting haptic lenses in his eyes — maybe all that got to him a little bit.”

Bear in mind, Pitt was on the verge of superstardom at the time. He was coming off Thelma & Louise, as well as A River Runs Through It. He’d also just filmed Legends of the Fall, which, along with Interview, were destined to cement his movie star status by the end of 1994. Jordan theorizes that his dissatisfaction with playing the submissive Louis opposite the dominant Lestat may have influenced the choices he’d make from there.

“When we later see Brad Pitt in Fight Club, Se7en and the Quentin Tarantino movies, he’s much more muscular, aggressive and all-American,” Jordan says. “So maybe that’s the direction he wanted to go in, but at the time, he was between directions in a way.”

Across its theatrical and home video releases, the sumptuous vampire drama would go on to gross over four times its $50 million to $60 million production budget. Warners soon contracted Jordan to write a sequel, The Vampire Lestat, based on Rice’s second installment in her The Vampire Chronicles series. However, Cruise’s then-lack of interest in sequels — and in reprising the role — has kept that script in a drawer ever since.

In 2022, AMC began adapting The Vampire Chronicles as a TV series, starting with two seasons devoted to Interview with the Vampire. The third season evolved into The Vampire Lestat, exploring Lestat’s time as a rock star in a modern context alongside his origin story in the 18th century. Jordan says his sequel would have focused more on the latter.

“I wasn’t as interested in Lestat as a David Lee Roth, Iggy Pop kind of rock star with leather pants and a muscular torso. It seemed a little bit cornball to me,” Jordan reveals. “The bulk of the script that I wrote was about Lestat’s story in the 18th century, how he was turned into a vampire against his knowledge and against his will. I would’ve loved to have done that. I would’ve opened it on the Golden Gate Bridge [like the end of Interview with the Vampire].”

Below, in a conversation with THR, Jordan also discusses remaining faithful to Rice’s Interview with the Vampire despite reworking what he considered to be a “limp” ending.

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It’s always interesting to revisit movies many years later. We process them differently with time and distance, and I imagine filmmakers have a particularly unique version of that experience. What struck you most when you opened Interview with the Vampire back up for the new 4K release?

When I watched it again, I really was just glad I was allowed to make it. I like the movie, and it still seems like the kind of movie that studios don’t normally make.

Following The Crying Game, you probably had multiple doors you could’ve gone through at the time. Do you remember the circumstances that led you through this one?

I was being asked to do very many things by different people. I wasn’t going to direct another Indiana Jones, although I suppose now I’d be doing a Marvel movie, wouldn’t I?

The jump from indies to franchises is often how it goes now.

I wouldn’t have done that. I’m Irish. I liked the vampire thing. I liked the challenge of turning a vampire movie into a huge historical epic, all at night. The visual challenges of it really excited me, and I liked Anne Rice’s book and the script she had written. A decade earlier, I had made a movie called The Company of Wolves with [novelist-screenwriter] Angela Carter, and it was a fantasy — a fairy tale gone dark, wrong and weird. Before she died in 1992, she wanted to make a movie that she was going to call Vampirella. So I saw The Interview with the Vampire as a companion piece to what myself and Angela had done all those years before. That was it, basically. It was a weird thing, but it was cool and lovely.

Casting Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt was the coup of all casting coups, especially since Cruise’s character is absent for a 40-minute stretch in the second hour. Considering he was, and is, the biggest movie star in the world, did Cruise voice any concern at the time?

No, he didn’t. Not at all. He just liked the challenge of playing a flamboyant monster. When everyone told him he was not the right choice for the part, he liked the challenge of proving them wrong. It’s a great part, and he’s a great actor. He was just beginning to explore the non-Tom Cruise aspects of himself, and there are a lot of sides to Tom that he has yet to explore, let me put it that way.

The backlash to his casting included the aforementioned author and screenwriter Anne Rice, so he used that as bulletin board material?

It was a pain in the ass for me as a director, for him as an actor and for the entire production, when the whole world was saying, “Oh, you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong.” You don’t want the challenge of having to prove yourself right. You want the challenge of making the character work and the movie work. So the opposition that Anne Rice took to his casting, and stuff like that, was an absolute distraction. It wasn’t a welcome thing at all. But I don’t think it was a contributing factor to what he did with the part. I think he did what he thought was interesting.

I mentioned the 40-minute stretch in which Lestat does not appear, but there are rumors of deleted scenes where he teamed up with the Théâtre des Vampires to get revenge against Louis and Claudia. Did you actually shoot any material with Cruise for that Paris section?

Yeah, I did. I shot one little scene, but it wasn’t very good. It wasn’t very interesting. I don’t know why. But when we met him again in New Orleans, it was fucking great. We’ve included deleted scenes on the [4K Blu-ray].

Yes, I watched them. I wondered if Lestat’s Paris scene would be among them, but now I know why you didn’t include it.

It didn’t make sense, really. The character would not have been that weak [in the Paris scene]. It was more interesting to find him in that abandoned house in New Orleans. There was something ghoulish and denatured about him in some strange way. That was much more interesting than seeing him with a bunch of strange … The fact of the matter is, the Theater of Vampires displayed itself best in the scenes in the theater itself. This coven of vampires living in these crypts was only interesting when you began to chop them with a scythe like Brad Pitt eventually did.

Of all the deleted scenes, is Louis’ confession the one you regret not including the most?

I cannot work out why that’s not in the finished movie. I’m sorry about that. I just can’t work it out. It’s been 30 years. I had long discussions with the editor about it. We were trying to track down our very first cut, and we couldn’t find it in the Warners vaults. But we did find these deleted scenes, some of which are interesting. So that’s why I’ve included them.

Brad, in hindsight, talks about how miserable he was shooting nights in the makeup and being hung upside down to drain the blood from his face.

It’s all my fault. All of that.

So it’s not retroactive exaggeration?

No, I sensed it at the time. We had intense discussions about it. You’ve got to face it. We shot six months at night in New Orleans, Paris and New York. Then we got some respite on the Pinewood set we used. But the problem is that the character suffers. Interview with the Vampire is Louis’ account of how he was turned into this thing by somebody who jumped him in the middle of the night. And he has spent the rest of his life trying to understand what this thing is. So that’s the part that Brad played, and he found it very oppressive in a way that Louis himself found it oppressive. So the combination of the part and Brad’s unease about shooting constantly at night — and me hanging him upside down and painting the veins on his face and putting haptic lenses in his eyes — maybe all that got to him a little bit.

He’d done Thelma & Louise, Legends of the Fall and A River Runs Through It. He was on the cusp of defining what kind of actor he wanted to be. When we later see Brad Pitt in Fight Club, Se7en and the Quentin Tarantino movies, he’s much more muscular, aggressive and all-American. So maybe that’s the direction he wanted to go in, but at the time, he was between directions in a way. He was still quite a young actor, but a great actor.

Kirsten Dunst’s character, Claudia, really tells it like it is, and from my interaction with her, Kirsten herself is also a straight shooter. Was she direct and forthright even as an 11-year-old kid?

She was a kid, but the minute I met her and tested her, I knew she’d be acting for the rest of her life. I didn’t feel the normal trepidation one has when casting a kid. I said to her mother at the time, “You do realize she’ll be acting for the rest of her life?” And her mother said, “Yes, she knows that.” So we cast a kid who was not only a superb actor, but she also played one of the most interesting parts in the whole story. Claudia is a child who is never able to grow up, and there’s something fairy tale-ish and ghoulish about it. There’s something of a porcelain doll about it. Of all the dilemmas that all the characters faced, it was the most interesting dilemma.

Nowadays, so many movies set themselves up for sequels, but in the ’90s, it was a rare occurrence. And to me, the ending in the Mustang always felt like it was setting up another movie. Were you actually thinking about a potential The Vampire Lestat movie when you shot it?

No, I just wanted to bring the character back in. I thought the ending of the book was kind of limp. [Christian Slater’s] Molloy says, “I want to be what you are.” And Louis says, “You’ve not listened to anything I’ve said, have you?” Then he vanishes, and Molloy runs down the street without knowing what he’s done. I just thought it was a bit limp. So I wrote this fun ending to bring Lestat back into the picture because I enjoyed the Lestat that Tom Cruise gave birth to in the earlier sections of the film. It was great to see him back again.

There was a conversation with [producer] David Geffen. He’d bought the rights to the whole string of [The Vampire Chronicles books]. After we made the movie, Warners asked me to write a script for the second book, The Vampire Lestat, which I did. But I wasn’t as interested in Lestat as a David Lee Roth, Iggy Pop kind of rock star with leather pants and a muscular torso. It seemed a little bit cornball to me, but I did write a script.

The bulk of the script that I wrote was about Lestat’s story in the 18th century, how he was turned into a vampire against his knowledge and against his will. He was an actor in the Commedia dell’arte troupe, and it was fascinating to me. His mother gets sick, and he turns her into a vampire. It was kind of cool. I would’ve loved to have done that. If I had done that, I would’ve opened it on the Golden Gate Bridge [like the end of Interview with the Vampire].

[Writer’s Note: At that point, Cruise not only didn’t make sequels to his own movies, but he also declined the chance to reprise Lestat, effectively ending the short-lived follow-up idea.]

There’s been a lot of debate this year about creative license in adaptations. The Odyssey in particular received so much guff for its changes, but a movie adaptation is not meant to be a 1:1 translation. So how did you approach that tug of war between the source material and doing what’s best for the movie?

Well, there was no tug of war at all, really. When I was given the project, it had been hanging around for years. I just heard that Anne Rice spoke to Tom Hanks about playing Lestat at one point [n ’93], and there was an earlier version of it where she apparently wanted to change the character of Louis to a woman and have Cher play that role.

[Writer’s Note: Rice’s novel was optioned upon its release in 1976, but the project stalled in development, which she believed was largely due to its homoerotic themes. As a last-ditch effort to get the film greenlit in the ’80s, she gender-swapped the role and heterosexualized the Louis-Lestat relationship. Geffen then approached her in 1992 for a more faithful adaptation.]

The novel was beautiful, and I could feel the atmosphere of it. I could touch it almost. But a lot of stuff had been taken out of the existing script. So when Geffen and Warners asked me to do it, I said, “I’d love to do it, but will you let me do my own pass on the script?” And they did. So I went back to Anne’s book and reintroduced a lot of elements from the book.

One of the main changes that Anne had introduced in the script was Louis lamenting not the death of his brother, but the death of his wife, when the story opens. It’s not a huge change, really, but I do think the movie is as accurate to the book as a movie can probably be without turning it into a version of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I tried to reproduce exactly the feeling I had when I returned to that novel, so I think it’s pretty accurate.

The metaphor of two men, sexuality and blood is intact. The fact is that it’s a gay family with a child at the center of it. The child is created to keep this family together. It’s all there, really. The most dynamic aspect of the book was this family. There’s Lestat, the dominant; Louis, the passive; and Claudia, the kid. That was it. So I thought I’d make a movie about the story of this family, and it’s as accurate to the book as I could make it. I can see how you could take that material and go anywhere with it, but I regarded my job to reflect the novel itself.

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Interview with the Vampire is now available on 4K Blu-ray.