25 Things You Didn’t Know About Interview With The Vampire
1. Tom Cruise Was Determined To Prove Anne Rice Wrong
Cruise had been floored by Rice's initial criticism - it wasn’t something he’d ever encountered before.
When it first hit, it really hurt my feelings, to be candid about it. Her venom hurt… You don’t usually start a movie with someone not wanting you to do it. That’s unusual.
The negativity only made him want to prove her wrong and he buried himself in the part, grabbing it by the jugular. He reread Interview With The Vampire over and over, reading all of Rice’s other novels too.
He went on a strict diet to get to the appropriate weight so that his cheekbones would pop, dropping twelve pounds and maintaining that exact weight for the entire shoot. He learned to play the piano, memorising pieces so that he could mimic Lestat’s flawless style at the keys at the drop of a hat.
He researched the life of the eighteenth century French aristocrat that Lestat was. He visited Versailles and Paris, spending time in museums, looking into the fashions and art of the time. More than that, he researched Lestat: Interview With The Vampire is told from Louis’ point of view, after all, and he found that he needed to parse the novel carefully “to find the clues to who Lestat is.”
Finally, he acquired the predatory mindset he needed to be Lestat by obsessively watching videos of lions and other predators at work in the wild. The results speak for themselves. Cruise was a revelation: charismatic, layered, Lestat body and soul.