10 Actors That Totally Overprepared For A Role
4. Tom Cruise Learned A Whole Bunch Of Skills - Interview With A Vampire
Paramount Pictures actually secured the rights to adapt Anne Rice’s 1978 gothic horror Interview With a Vampire before the book was even published. However, the film languished in developmental hell for a long time, causing Rice’s dream casting ideas to be no longer feasible when it finally bore fruit 15 years later.
The studio picked Tom Cruise to play the leading role of vampiric Lestat, off the back of his successes in Top Gun and Born on the Fourth of July. Rice was publicly vocal about her displeasure at the choice.. She felt that his clean-cut image would sand down the edges of her story and worried about his untested potential to play a villain.
Cruise had to swallow his pride and simply get on with it, launching into preparing for the role.
This included reading not just the Interview With a Vampire novel but the entire series to better understand Lestat, as well as moving to Paris, shifting 12 pounds of weight and learning to play the piano. He also watched hours of footage of lions hunting zebras because he saw Lestat as not necessarily evil but more of a survivalist.
Anne Rice would eat humble pie when she saw the finished film. She chose to pay $7k for a two-page spread in Daily Variety magazine to apologise, praise Cruise’s portrayal and rescind her doubts.