25 Things You Didn’t Know About Interview With The Vampire
13. Oprah Hated The Film So Much It Changed Her Whole Show
The queen of the talk show, Oprah Winfrey was not a fan of Interview With The Vampire. Together with the two-dozen-odd crew she’d brought with her, she actually walked out of an LA pre-release screening during the first reel - some say in the first ten minutes.
Affronted by the film’s decadent, sinister tone and by the amount of gore onscreen, Oprah described herself years later as having had “an abysmal reaction to it! It felt dark and oppressive to me.”
She’d flown out to California specifically to interview Cruise about the movie, but hadn’t seen it beforehand, and with two hours to go until the interview was forced to call Pat Kingsley, Cruise’s ultra-formidable publicist, and admit that she couldn’t watch the film.
To Cruises’ credit, he urged Oprah to go ahead with the show, telling her just to tell the truth about how she felt. "I believe there are forces of light and darkness in the world, and I don't want to be a contributor to the forces of darkness," she admitted to him in the resulting interview. Cruise, ever the professional, consoled her by saying "the movie is not for everyone.”
Since then, Oprah has implemented what she calls the Tom Cruise lesson: she would never again put herself in a position to be promoting something she didn’t believe in. From that moment until the show went off the air, no movie, book or show was presented on The Oprah Winfrey Show unless she’d reviewed and signed off on it.