Interview with the Vampire: How Tom Cruise shocked everyone with his Lestat
There are a handful of human beings, fictional or real, who you simply don’t dare doubt their ability to accomplish something they set their minds to.
Rocky Balboa. Michael Jordan. Michael Myers? Tom Cruise just wrapped an unforgettable run in his Mission: Impossible series with The Final Reckoning and closed the book on nearly thirty years of breathing that rare air on both fronts: in fiction as Ethan Hunt and in the real world as himself. Dangling off planes and diving off motorcycles past the age of sixty years old while single handedly keeping the blockbuster action movie spectacle alive. While his character literally saved the world and accomplished the impossible again and again, and again to the point where we are going to have to make up a new word for impossible because it just doesn’t hold any weight once Ethan Hunt was through. Well before Tom Cruise ever rubbed that stick of gum together and killed all those fictional innocent fish, he faced a seemingly impossible task in his professional life: playing the character of Lestat in the star studded feature film adaptation of novelist Anne Rice’s all-time famous bestseller Interview with the Vampire.
We all know Tommy rocked the hell out of this role today, which we’ll be discussing in this video. But at the time, almost no one even wanted him nor believed he could handle the role. At the time Cruise was announced to play Lestat opposite Brad Pitt, the actor had already made a clear name for himself with movies like Top Gun, Days of Thunder, and even A Few Good Men already in his trophy case. But this character was different from all of those roles. Cruise had mastered the art of playing the handsome, cocky, and fresh-faced overcomer of odds. But perhaps people didn’t realize he had that in himself as well before he kicked down the door and jumped all over their proverbial couches. That was probably a poor analogy in this case.
The character of Lestat was the opposite of all of those roles. In Anne Rice’s classic, the character was no clean-cut All-American. He was a European, aristocratic, and androgynous antihero unlike the roles audiences were used to seeing Cruise in. The outrage was louder than a weird old rich lady trying to get banged in the park but instead realizing her poodles were just turned into empty bottles of fuzzy Squeeze Its. But it wasn’t just the fans. What hurt was the fact that Anne Rice herself came out in loud objection to specifically Cruise’s casting in the role. She was furious. In part because the original book and its adaptation she’d written with Neil Jordan had meant so much to her. And in part because Daniel Day Lewis (her first choice) had turned the role down, and the studio ignored her requests to hire Jeremy Irons for the part or hell, even have Brad Pitt in the role. Forget her original dreams that Rutger Hauer would play the character. She was stuck with Cruise and there was nothing she could do about it. But not for a lack of trying. Rice didn’t simply make a snide comment here or there. She went on a full-fledged campaign alongside her angry fans against the casting of Cruise. And it hurt the actor on a personal level.
Cruise, at the time only 31 years old, would even tell Esquire that it “really hurt my feelings, to be candid about it.” That “you don’t usually start a movie with someone not wanting you to do it” and that “her venom hurt.” To be honest though, aside from the general suspiciousness that Hollywood is going to desecrate any piece of literature it touches, most of the world seemed to share Rice’s skepticism. It was far and wide seen as a miscast at the time.
One man stood in Cruise’s corner at least: producer David Geffen. Geffen dared call Rice “a difficult woman at best” and shamed her for lacking kindness and professionalism for a project in which she was paid handsomely. There was her open desecration of the project post Cruise casting where she said Tom Cruise was an actor with “no voice,”. Her fans, now emboldened even further, petitioned the film with haste at every opportunity. The president of publicity for Warner Bros went to bat for Cruise as well amid Rice’s angry campaign, noting that her book sales were suddenly skyrocketing from all the fuss and calling it “good old fashioned hucksterism.” Rice claimed that she didn’t start this frenzy of hate but rather felt compelled to back up her readers who lined up outside of her book promotions with signs chanting “No Tom Cruise!” and handing her petitions with thousands of signatures. She stoked the fire by saying to thousands of fans that Cruise had demanded the sexuality of the script be tamed down to save face for his clean cut image. It’s unknown what truth there was to this, but it certainly didn’t help.
So what did Tom Cruise do? He locked in. And I don’t know if you know this about Tom Cruise, but he’s a pretty damn determined human being. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Tom Cruise run, but he’s on my top five list of people I do not want to turn around and see chasing me through a dark alley. I’d just fall to my knees like Jenny in Forrest Gump and start praying, “Dear God, make me a bird so I could fly far. Far away from here.”
Cruise dived head first into Rice’s books. He went to museums and visited France to get more in tune with the eighteenth century lifestyles and history he’d be asked to portray. He dropped twelve pounds of weight, dyed his hair, and did it all with a smile on his face. Hell, if it were humanly possible to do so, he would have willed himself to even grow a few inches taller; another complaint of Rice’s, that he was “too short” to play the character if nothing else. While the open doored cynicism to his casting reached a fever pitch outside, with Hollywood rumors even claiming Cruise had secret tunnels built from his dressing room for some peculiar reason; Cruise was putting in his best effort, and in the end would prove everyone wrong the same way Ethan Hunt has done so many times on screen since. Director Neil Jordan perhaps said it best when he claimed that “Every casting choice is a leap, and if it works, it’s because the actor makes it fit his own skin.” Exactly what Tom Cruise did. In the same skin that required he and Brad Pitt to literally hang upside down for thirty minutes at a time to drain the blood from their faces before shooting. Which, to be honest, is mind-blowing and even caused Pitt at one point to call up Geffen and ask how much it would cost him to leave the project. But both actors fought through the adversity of it all (of which I’m sure the nice pay helped).
Cruise, though wrongfully accused of demanding script changes and even homophobia for it by some, explained how he even went as far as putting massive intent behind each and every vampire bite Lestat employed upon his victims. He learned to bite each victim in a different, erotic way each time. To portray the story of a unique relationship in each of his on screen kills.
The outcome, as we all know today, was that Cruise would deliver a powerhouse performance in a movie stacked with them. His Lestat managed to somehow walk the line between an abominable monster with no regard for human life and someone who could make you laugh and want to spend more time with. Someone both grotesque and entrancing, who you wanted to see die but felt bad for every time you watched him flirt with death. He was frightening and despicable. Yet you somehow wanted to kind of cheer every time he popped back on screen, undoubtedly, about to do something horrendous to someone innocent. The same way you can watch Ethan Hunt be put into an unwinnable situation and just know he was going to overcome the odds; you watched Lestat and just knew that this guy was going to make an unholy mess of everything yet walk away laughing. Ever the smartest guy in the room, even when he’s been poisoned, bled out, left for dead and set on fire. Though I do find it funny that he could live for hundreds of years and still not understand the simple three step process of “Stop, drop, and roll.”
Though you can’t please everyone and some critics maintained he was miscast in respect to the famous literary character, there’s no doubt he surprised the world when Interview with the Vampire was released in 1994. The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley said he “brings a wicked wit to the ghoulish role.” The New York Times said he was “flabbergastingly right” for the role and brought a “fiery, mature sexual magnetism.” The fan hate train for his casting came to a screeching halt and perhaps most important of all? Anne Rice, to her absolute credit, admitted that she was dead wrong in her previous criticisms.
It’s important to point out here that Anne Rice isn’t the villain of this particular story. For one, because the story had been so personal for her, in turn leading to her impassioned early dismissal of the casting. Not only was it an extremely important story for her life’s work, but it was a story near and dear to her that she went through her own Mission: Impossible to have adapted. Not to mention she wrote the book in 1975 after the tragic death of her five year old daughter from leukemia. She was a person who truly believed she was right, and when she proved to be incorrect, owned up to it wholeheartedly.
Before the film’s release and despite their public tensions, David Geffen sent her a private VHS of the completed film. Upon realizing how impressed she was with Cruise’s portrayal of the character, she literally bought two pages in Variety to praise the film and Cruise in particular. She openly rooted for the film to be a major success, and of course, it was. In an open letter she praised Cruise, saying that “the moment he appeared Tom was Lestat for me. He has the immense physical and moral presence; he was defiant and yet never without conscience” in just one piece of a multi-paragraphed letter praising of his performance. She praised her favorite moments of Cruise including his initial attack on Louis, his angry outbursts throughout the film, and the way he portrayed the character’s need to create and move forward despite the fact that deep down he hated himself and his situation as much as the characters around him.
There’s no doubt that one of Cruise’s best feats in his performance as Lestat was his ability to bring fun, charisma, and anarchy to a story wrought with so much pain and despair. Despite all the doubts, it’s hard to watch Interview with the Vampire and imagine any other actor in that role. Though being a character who brings forth immense dread and morally disgusting behavior, Tom Cruise cannot help but be charismatic and entertaining. So with that, we salute not only the fascinating literary character of Lestat but the writer who created him throughout their own turmoil and the actor who once again… and again… rose against all odds to make it pure cinema on the screen. In a way perhaps only Tom Cruise can. Now watch him eat popcorn.
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