Kirsten Dunst‘s Claudia, Brad Pitt’s Louis and Tom Cruise’s Lestat in Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire
Courtesy of Warner Bros.
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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.
Neil Jordan and Brad Pitt on the set of Interview with the Vampire
Courtesy of Warner Bros.
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.
Kirsten Dunst as Claudia in Interview with the Vampire
Courtesy of Warner Bros.
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.]
Christian Slater’s Daniel Molloy interviews Brad Pitt’s Louis in Interview with the Vampire
Courtesy of Warner Bros.
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.
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Peter Byrne, the singer and songwriter for the band Naked Eyes who scored 1980s hits with “Always Something There to Remind Me” and “Promises, Promises,” died peacefully in Los Angeles, California, on Monday, September 14, after a brief illness. He was 74.
His death was announced on the band’s official website.
One of the most popular, if fleeting, British New Wave bands of MTV’s golden era, Naked Eyes was founded in 1982 by Byrne and keyboardist Rob Fisher, who had been college friends in their native Bath, England, and had performed together in a band called Neon from 1979 to 1982. (That band also included Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal, who would go on to form Tears for Fears.)
Within two years Naked Eyes had scored four Top 40 hits on Billboard’s Hot 100. The highest charting was “Always Something There to Remind Me” which peaked at #8 during the summer of 1983. A cover of the 1963 song written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David for Dionne Warwick, the Byrne-Fisher demo of “Always Something There to Remind Me” was strong enough to convince EMI Records to sign the duo that would become Naked Eyes.
The band had three subsequent top 40 hits, the most successful of which was “Promises, Promises,” written by Byrne and Fisher and not to be confused with the Bacharach-David song of the same title that was a hit for Warwick. Both songs were included on the band’s debut 1983 album Burning Bridges, as was a third, less successful single “When the Lights Go Out.”
The band’s second album, 1984’s Fuel For The Fire, featured a modest hit “(What) In the Name of Love,” but failed to match the success of the debut album, prompting Naked Eyes to disband (the group never toured). Fisher died in 1999 at the age of 42 following cancer surgery.
Born June 9, 1952, in Bath, Byrne continued writing, recording and touring following Fisher’s death, releasing the solo album The Real Illusion in 2001 under Pete Byrne, followed by two albums under the Naked Eyes name: Fumbling with the Covers in 2007 and Disguise the Limit in 2021. A remaster of the original Naked Eyes self-titled album was release in 2025.
In 2008 Byrne’s Naked Eyes too, part in the U.S. “Regeneration” tour with Belinda Carlisle, ABC and the Human League, and in 2024 joined a similarly ’80s themed tour of the U.S. and Canada with Wang Chung, Men Without Hats and The Motels.
Outside of Naked Eyes, Byrne’s work included providing backing vocals on Stevie Wonder’s 1985 hit “Part-Time Lover,” as well as songwriting for film and television. He wrote the song “I Am The Cute One” in 1993 for the Olsen Twins.
Byrne is survived by his siblings Eileen, Sandy, Carol and Steve; children Merlin, Dylan, and Chloe; and ex-wife Elena. A private service will be held for the family.
Listen to “Promises, Promises” and “Always Something There To Remind Me” below:
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SPOILER ALERT: This piece spoils the entirety of The Love Hypothesis movie now streaming on Prime Video.
Editor’s Note: Trigger Warning – The following contains mention of sexual harassment. Help is available at the National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673.
The order of several pivotal scenes in Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis was switched up for the film adaptation of the best-selling romance novel, directed by Claire Scanlon and starring Tom Bateman and Lili Reinhart.
The film centers around a fake dating ploy that benefits both parties — Olive (Reinhart) convinces her best friend Ahn (Rachel Marsh) that Ahn should shoot her shot with their mutual crush Jeremy and Adam (Bateman) makes his higher ups aware that he’s in a serious relationship and in no way planning to leave Stanford University, which has funded much of his research but pulled the plug based on rumors that he might depart. What starts out as a simple business arrangement develops into real romance, which faces its obstacles when a certain Dr. Tom Benton (Arty Froushan) comes to town.
The very important Chapter 16 sex scene between Olive and Adam was moved up in the film, and Scanlon already felt the “pressure” to get that one right alone. Luckily an audience of 40% book readers and fans gave the green light.
“When we started, there was just a quick paragraph of the sex scene, and then I read the book, and [said to] Sarah Rothschild, who wrote a great adaptation, ‘I think we need to build out that sex scene.’ Then I went on TikTok and I saw everyone [saying] ‘chapter 16, chapter 16.” I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, this has to be more,’ Scanlon told Deadline. “Translating the book, which is over a chapter, to the screen — you can’t do that long with a sex scene. That would be not right. But just making sure that you got it tonally is always going to be tricky because everyone’s got their own internal dialog and their own imagination of what it all looks like. We were ready for all the criticism, and then there wasn’t any.”
To back up, a chaotic kiss with Dr. Carlsen initiated by Olive sets the fake-dating scheme of The Love Hypothesis into motion. Olive panics and smooches the first man she sees — who happens to be the notorious Dr. Evil — to throw Ahn off the scent late one Saturday night in the lab. This snowballs into a whiplash of planned PDA and falling in love between the scientists.
“We shot the first kiss on the first week. I wanted to make sure we got that dynamic established. And when we got that scene, I was like, ‘We have a movie’ because you just get all of it, watching it, trying to recreate the book cover in the actual scene. Paying homage to the book cover, and just in general, trying to get the tone of that scene, all the elements that were going into it. Ahn’s coming up the stairs, [Olive]’s running this way. He’s like, “What?” Scanlon said. “Then he’s pissed because when you think about it from his point of view, he hasn’t been touched for years by anyone. Everyone’s so scared of him. That fact that someone smacked a kiss on him and then immediately rejects him, like that’s gotta suck, you know?”
Dr. Carlsen quips about filing a Title IX complaint because Olive technically doesn’t wait for him to give consent before she kisses him. Another key moment that brings Title IX truly into question was shuffled to occur after the Chapter 16 scene, compared to book order. Carlsen’s colleague and seemingly close friend Dr. Tom Benton, whose research aligns with Olive’s pancreatic cancer work, offers her a position on his lab bench at Harvard University to continue conducting her experiments, but rather than base it off of Olive’s merit alone, he lays down the ultimatum that Olive must sleep with him in order to use his lab and equipment.
RELATED: Which Ali Hazelwood Books Are Becoming Movies? ‘The Love Hypothesis,’ ‘Deep End’ & More
“Visually, it made more sense to have this lovely night, be on a high, and then the rug pulled out from beneath [Olive]. In so many ways, you have to truncate scenes and support the chronological order of things, and so it was something that we needed to manage and address. And then, because we changed that order, he couldn’t come at her and right after the conference, it had to be something different,” Scanlon said. “We liked the idea of him being able to say, “I had coffee. I had a coffee in my hand the whole time. I never didn’t have a coffee,” so he would have plausible deniability.”
What seems like an innocent move to bring coffee up to Adam’s hotel room at the Society for Biological Development Conference quickly turns sinister with the knowledge that Adam has already flown back to California. His implication that their working relationship be “equally beneficial” to that between Olive and Adam quickly sours his offer and her exciting opportunity, not to mention complicating matters between Olive and Adam as well as Adam and Tom by extension.
“She can’t get out. He’s blocking her from the door. There was a lot of talk about things that, technically, in a legal case, he’s probably done this so many times. He knows exactly how to do it, like so many people do,” Scanlon added. “[He] could have plausible deniability, but technically, we know how she looks, and we are experiencing what she’s experiencing, and you know darn well what he’s doing. We thought a lot about it.”
In the below interview, Scanlon further unpacks the denouement of the film, full circle moments, working in the romantic comedy space and whether an Ali Hazelwood cameo was discussed. She also teases upcoming project The Probability of Miracles, a TV show currently in production with Prime Video.
DEADLINE: Ahn is the one to tell Adam about Tom Benton, and they’re looking at each other in the mirrors. Can you talk about filming that scene?
SCANLON: We shot in that same space twice, the opening of the movie, which was very obfuscated, so you never see what Adam looks like because of [Olive’s] contact lenses. And then, obviously, what’s so interesting about shooting into the mirror? It’s a small space, but also, Ahn is feeling him out. Is [Adam] duplicitous? Is he on board? Does he know that Tom has this proclivity to sexually harass women that he works with? Is he complicit? So I think there’s this duality and reflection, “Are you a good person or not?”
L-R: Jeremy (Nicholas Duvernay), Ahn (Rachel Marsh), and Malcolm (Jaboukie Young-White) in ‘The Love Hypothesis’
Philippe Bossé/ Prime Video © Amazon MGM Studios
You’re looking in the mirror and it’s kind of like, “Who are you? Who is this person in the mirror?” And then when she says, “Did you know?” And he’s like, “Know what? And she’s like, “He’s a piece of shit.” And he’s like, “Wait, what? And she’s like, “Okay, I gave you the benefit of the doubt. Rightfully so. Here’s what happened. “And he’s like, “You’re a good friend Ahn. And she’s like, “Yeah, duh.” And then he storms off to the tune of our version of Darth Vader’s theme.
DEADLINE: I was going to ask about that music sounding like Darth Vader.
SCANLON: And it’s when he comes in the coffee shop. In the rough cut, we actually just used John Williams, and it always elicited a laugh. And then our wonderful composer Laura Karpman, I was like, “Laura, you’ve got to pay your best John Williams homage at this moment,” and she had so much fun with it.
DEADLINE: Did you ever talk to Ali [Hazelwood] about a cameo? Was that ever thought of in the film?
SCANLON: Yes, and the answer was no. She came to set. I feel like she gave us her blessing, first with the script, but then she also came to set when we were shooting at Cal Tech. We did a day in LA. We shot mostly in Montreal.
We did a day in LA for exteriors with Lili, and it looks really good when she’s storming through the campus to go confront [Adam] after she finds out that Malcolm’s been fired from his team. Anytime you see a palm tree, odds are that, either, we were carrying two palm trees in Montreal, and we just would stick them in the background. Or when there’s a myriad of palm trees, that’s Caltech.
But she came that day, and she was so sweet. She is very quiet and unassuming. As [producer] Elizabeth [Cantillon] would say, she’s like a sprightly little elf putting pixie dust over everything in a wonderful way. You really see how she holds up other authors. She’s always advocating for others. She saw this and she said all these nice things about the film. She’s just really a wonderful advocate who uses her space in media to uphold others, and she’s done so with this film as well.
DEADLINE: The scene where they’re making the Rube Goldberg machine looked really fun and chaotic. Plus it’s not in the book.
SCANLON: We realized there were some scenes where she’s in his world, and we just wanted a scene where he’s in her world. So that’s where that came out about. First we were gonna do an ABC (Anything But Clothes) party. So you make balloons instead, or use a keg, or you make stuff out of like boxes, and it’s silly, but they’re fun.
But comfortability-wise, we were like, “That’s not gonna work.” It’s fun on the page, but we started talking to the costume designer, and they’re like, “Yeah, no, this is really hard for all those background actors to have anything but clothes on.” It would just have been a nightmare. And then the Rube Goldberg of it all, I remember Elizabeth being like, “We have to storyboard this.” And both the DP and I were like, “Oh no, no, no, no!” We know exactly how to approach this. It’s got to be chaos. It’s handheld. Nothing really is handheld in the film other than the sex scene and the Rube Goldberg machine. But just him being in her world and actually being able to hang and getting people to like him. He’s coming in and nobody likes him, and then being fun and helping and being game basically shows you, “Oh they really could get on. They might actually be each other’s people.”
L-R: Tom Bateman carries Lili Reinhart in ‘The Love Hypothesis movie
Philippe Bossé/Amazon MGM Studios
DEADLINE: The epilogue two years later when the students are talking about rumors around Olive felt really full circle from when she walks into the Bass Building at the beginning of the film. Why did you want to bring it to an end that way?
SCANLON: Oh, for sure, it’s the two of them. There’s two girls coming in, and it was Ahn and Olive coming in the first go-around when they were nervous and starting. And Ahn’s like, “Let’s go up front. You can’t sit in the back. Can’t learn anything from the back.” And you’re watching two other girls, proxies for our two main stars. It is funny that Doctor Evil had a nickname and now it’s Doctor Smythe and her whole thing was trying to not make him Doctor Evil, but I think no matter what you do, the game of telephone is going to happen with scared young people starting school and they’re going to give you a nickname whether you like it or not, and it’s up to you to show, “Hey, yeah, I’m tough,” but like she said, someone got dehydrated from a party the night before. It wasn’t that she was a tough teacher, but it’s like a little bit of fear. Let’s let that ride. A little fear is good.
DEADLINE: Did you feel any similarities to Set It Up when you were filming The Love Hypothesis? Or maybe anything that informed you from shooting Set It Up? Rom coms are doing so well right now. I’m curious your thoughts there.
SCANLON: I would say my favorite films, my touchstone films that I always encourage people to watch when we’re working together on something like this — I did it on Set It Up — are His Girl Friday, It Happened One Night, The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby, and those were called screwball comedies. I don’t quite know what change happened to call them romantic comedies because aren’t they the same essentially? I love those. Those are my favorite movies, and I like how witty the women are. They are equals, and this is the 30s and 40s, and I would say nothing’s changed. They still hold true. All those films still feel fun and fresh, and women are definitely the drivers of those films, and I love that. That’s probably why I was drawn to them in the first place. I think, for a while, the genre got a little lazy. I don’t think I’m unique in thinking this. Relying on the tropes rather than having fun with them, thwarting them. I think Set It Up definitely gave wink winks to them. Another touchstone would be When Harry Met Sally, three of the four people in that movie are just normal looking people, and they’re just in funny situations and they create funny situations and they miscommunicate and those are all things that happen in daily life. So I think the you can be in a silly situation, but it’s grounded.
This is at Stanford. It’s in labs. They really look like Stanford students. We had this wonderful consultant, Sonia Cruiz, who was so great and told us everything we were doing wrong and helped us set up the beakers and the test tubes and everything. So were some of the grad students that were in background. They were real grad students, so they knew too, at Concordia University in Montreal. They were totally having fun with it as well, feeling good that their field of study was being honored in a major motion picture. In general, I really try and strive to have lots of comedy in romantic comedies, not short shrift the comedy. That is my background too, and then also not take anyone for granted, have flawed characters but grounded and real, fully, three-dimensional.
I want to mention Malcolm in that regard. Malcolm could just appear like so many characters I’ve seen in these tropes of “gay black friend.” “Gay Black best friend” and check, we did that. We did all the things we’re supposed to do per 2026 PC rules. That’s not what he is at all. He is a three-dimensional flawed character who’s not pulling his own weight. He’s not doing a good job. He’s blaming his friend. He is not doing a great job moving through the world. He’s supportive of his friend to a point, but then he’s also slacking. He’s fully realized, and when he is an asshole, he’s an asshole through and through. He yells at her, and it’s not her fault. And he has done damage, and he has to do the repair. That is a great character to me. It’s not just like, “Hey, he’s got the witty comment because he’s funny and he’s gay and he’s Black.” He is just a real person.
And we need people just like him who fuck up, and then they have to apologize, or they’re not your friend anymore. There’s only one or two ways that was gonna go. I love the character of Malcolm for that reason. And I think Jaboukie [Young-White] was truly the only person to be able to bring him to life. He’s so good. And Jabouki was in Set It Up. He got a SAG card on Set It Up. His character got the key” “I know this key says do not duplicate, but you must duplicate, or my boss is going to kill me.” I was so happy for that full circle moment.
DEADLINE: What’s next for you?
SCANLON: The Probability of Miracles is something that’s shooting right now. That’s another book to to television adaptation. That one’s for Amazon.
It’s a really unusual show. It’s not the YA trope that you’re used to because it’s about a teen with cancer so it’s really different. I was like, “why do they want a comedy director?” But they did. I did get some surreal stuff to shoot. I’m very excited. I haven’t seen my editor’s cut yet. They’re still putting them together, so I’m excited for that. But I will tell you that television show was the first time I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with a female DP, Lindsay George, and she was phenomenal.
RELATED: Prime Video’s ‘The Probability of Miracles’ Adds 7 To Recurring Cast
She was out of this world, and I can’t wait to see how it all looks cut together because it was some beautiful cinematography, story aside, which is very impactful and powerful. And Ginny Goodwin is amazing in it. Ginnifer Goodwin, she plays the mum. It is gorgeous. I would watch it just for the visuals alone, and I think that it’s so high quality. Comedies can be very lazy, and TV can sometimes be lazy in terms of cinematography. I mean, not all of it. Obviously, like Widow’s Bay is incredible. I don’t mean to be reductive, but sometimes it is short-shrifted, especially in that space, and that is not the case with this at all. It is gorgeous.
I’m really excited, and it’s surreal. It’s definitely got a lot of magical surrealism because that’s what the story’s about.
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EXCLUSIVE: Lifetime has set the new original movie Love on the Vineyard, which will be released as part of the network’s Love of a Lifetime franchise, starring Paula Patton (Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Precious) and Derek Luke (13 Reasons Why, Antwone Fisher). The project reunites Patton with Luke, who previously starred in the 2013 romantic comedy Baggage Claim. Janet Hubert (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) also stars.
Tracey E. Edmonds (Soul Food, Jumping the Broom) returns to Lifetime to executive produce the film, which is set against the iconic backdrop of Martha’s Vineyard. The town of Oak Bluffs will be celebrated in Love on the Vineyard as one of America’s most historic Black communities.
Patton stars as Jordan Wilson, a successful Washington, D.C., commercial real estate executive who returns to Martha’s Vineyard with her teenage daughter after years away. There, Jordan reconnects with Eric Robinson (Luke), her former summer love, and becomes involved in a fight to save a beloved historic inn in Oak Bluffs, one that holds deep significance for the island’s Black community. As Jordan works to protect the property, she must navigate grief, family tensions, and the possibility of a second chance at love, discovering that preserving the past may be the key to embracing her future and reclaiming the love she thought she had lost forever.
Hubert will play Shirley Evans.
The film will close out Lifetime’s fall slate on Saturday, November 21, at 8/7c, following the previously announced romantic films Paradise with You, starring Taye Diggs, premiering November 7, and One Last Shot, starring, written, and executive produced by Tisha Campbell, premiering November 14.
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