INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE Director Talks About the Backlash He Faced After Casting Tom Cruise
One of director Neil Jordan’s biggest accomplishments in filmmaking was the 1994 adaptation of Anne Rice’s hugely popular book, Interview With the Vampire.
The film has remained a fan favorite, and though the cast was headlined by the biggest stars of the time, as well as today, Jordan faced some backlash after casting Tom Cruise in the lead role of Lestat de Lioncourt.
Cruise had already made a name for himself in films like Risky Business and Top Gun, as well as Cocktail, Rain Man, Young Guns, A Few Good Men, Far and Away, The Firm, and his Academy Award-nominated performance in Born on the Fourth of July.
He was Hollywood’s leading man, but Jordan had first offered the role to Daniel Day-Lewis, and fans were stuck on that fact.
In an excerpt from his new memoir published in The Telegraph, director Jordan reflected on his decision to cast Cruise opposite Brad Pitt and the outrage that followed.
“The problem was the casting of Lestat. 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. So we moved on.”
After meeting with Cruise twice at his house in Brentwood, Jordan realized that the actor actually had a lot in common with Lestat, something that made him sure of his decision.
“I finally got it. 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.”
Jordan noted that Cruise is “also a superb actor,” but “that small fact got lost in the outrage that followed.”
“Half of America, it seemed, had read Anne Rice’s books and wanted a say in the casting of Lestat. 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.”
Of course, Cruise’s performance later came to be appreciated by critics and is one of the defining roles in his oeuvre. Jordan further expanded on the topic in an interview with The Guardian, saying that “it must have been very difficult” for Cruise amid the backlash.
“The entire world said, ‘You are miscast.’ 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. It’s kind of strange.”
Pitt, who joined the film straight after Legends of the Fall, was exhausted by the night shoots and the character’s nature, Jordan said. “It simply wore him out. Brad’s a very active guy, that was the direction he wanted to go in. The passivity of the character got him down.”
Jordan’s next film is The Well of Saint Nobody, adapted from the director’s acclaimed 2023 novel of the same name.
Jordan’s Amnesiac: A Memoir will be published on June 20th.
via: Variety