'They Were All Wrong': Interview with the Vampire Director Recalls Outrage Over Tom Cruise Casting
1994 was a big year for Anne Rice adaptations, as it featured two of them: Garry Marshall's comedy thriller Exit to Eden, and Neil Jordan's Interview With the Vampire. The latter became a cult classic and was very successful, but it didn't come without backlash due to its casting.
In an excerpt from his upcoming memoir Amnesiac, which Jordan published in The Telegraph, the director argues why he cast "Hollywood's biggest star" as the glamorous Lestat de Lioncourt. Interview With the Vampire was based on the eponymous first novel in Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles series, a goth vampire series that combined erotic literature, Christian motives, and mythical creatures. The film starred Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in the leading roles, and the casting of the latter was considered controversial at the time.
Lestat de Lioncourt and Akasha from Queen of the Damned
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"The problem was the casting of Lestat," Jordan explained about casting one of the leads. "Brad Pitt had agreed to play Louis and somehow assumed Daniel Day-Lewis would be playing Lestat, an assumption shared by Anne. I offered it to Daniel, who read it, and, as I expected, didn’t want to play the character. A few years before, he had confined himself to a wheelchair to play Christy Brown in My Left Foot. He would have had to sleep in a coffin for the entirety of this production if he followed the same practice," Jordan explained about the Oscar winner's method acting. "So we moved on."
Half of America, it seemed, had read Anne Rices books and wanted a say in the casting of Lestat. They were all wrong.
The director recalled the intense backlash he received for not casting Day-Lewis. “Half of America, it seemed, had read Anne Rice’s books and wanted a say in the casting of Lestat,” he continued. “Anne herself took to the airwaves, saying that it was as if I had cast Edward G Robinson as Rhett Butler. But she was wrong and was later big enough to admit it. They were all wrong.”
“The entire world said, ‘You are miscast,’” Jordan said. “He’s a great actor. If he says he can do something, he will do it in a way that people will be shocked by. Tom has become the last remaining film star.”
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Lestat drives off with the journalist (1994)
Neil Jordan Detailed Casting Tom Cruise as Lestat
Jordan explains that producer David Geffen had been trying to adapt Rice's first novel for almost 20 years. He had a script written by the writer herself when he got the project and Rice called Jordan to convince him to jump on board. Once he agreed, he had his own take on the script and was given free rein to bring his vision to the big screen.
Jordan revealed he was susceptible to meet Cruise given his popularity at the time, but did it anyway. "He seemed fascinated by the character, the strength, the absence of any moral compass whatsoever. As we talked, I remembered something that Sean Penn had told me. Of all the young roustabouts of his generation, Cruise was the toughest, would never back down. I couldn’t quite get that picture from the preternaturally polite young man beside me, but there was something. There was something eerily self-made even about his physique, his evident fitness."
The director notes that he didn't cast Cruise instantly, but he "left him with a strange feeling." He met with him again at the actor's request at his home in Brentwood and cast him after realizing how much he had in common with the glamorous vampire. “He had to live a life removed from the gaze of others. He had made a contract with the hidden forces, whatever they turned out to be. He had to hide in the shadows, even in the Hollywood sunlight. He would be eternally young. He was a star. He could well be Lestat.”
Source: The Telegraph
Interview with the Vampire Film Poster
Director Neil JordanStudio Warner BrosRuntime 123 minutesMain Genre Horror