Interview with the Vampire director on casting Cruise over Day Lewis (2024)

Interview with the Vampire director Neil Jordan has addressed the backlash over his casting of Tom Cruise over Daniel Day Lewis in the 1994 movie.

Cruise, 61, memorably played antihero Lestat de Lioncourt - who turned Louis (Brad Pitt) into a vampire in the film adaptation of Anne Rice's novel - but at the time - there was uproar over the decision to cast the Top Gun star over Day Lewis, 62.

Director Neil Jordan, 74, details allegations he 'miscast' Cruise in his new memoir, writing in an excerpt per The Telegraph: 'Brad Pitthad 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 home, Jordan said he realized the superstar had a lot in common with Lestat - writing: '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 praised Cruise as a 'superb actor' but said that 'small fact got lost in the outrage' that followed - noting how even Rice herself had spoken out about her distaste for the casting - although she later apologized.

Esquire said of her frustrations: 'Spurred on by her readers, Rice has embarked on a one-woman crusade to embarrass Tom Cruise; Warner Brothers, the studio bankrolling the film; and David Geffen, the film's producer...

'Rice has been cursing Cruise for butchering her script, sanitizing the sexual content to accommodate his clean-cut image, and perpetuating the worst crime in the name of casting since The Bonfire of the Vanities...

'I wanted to call David Geffen and say, ‘How the hell could you do this?''

Tom later spoke out about his dismay over the news, saying: 'When it first hit, it really hurt my feelings, to be candid about it. You don’t usually start a movie with someone not wanting you to do it'. She later issued an apology.

Jordan added to The Guardian of the reaction to Cruise's casting: '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.

Jordan added that Pitt was left drained by the filming schedule - with the star having just wrapped Legends of the Fall - saying: '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.'

Pitt, then 30, debated trying to get out of filming the blockbuster, which had a budget of $60m (£47m), however discovered from producer and friend David Geffen, it would cost him $40m (£32m) to bow out - so he declined.

Brad played Louis in the movie - a grieving plantation owner, who is transformed into s vampire for all of eternity by Cruise's Lestat.

The 1994 film was Kirsten Dunst's breakthrough, she played a 10-year-old girl named Claudia who was turned into a vampire by Louis and Lestat.