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The bite stuff: Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and the making of ‘Interview with the Vampire’

As it turns 25, ed power looks at how the gothic bonkbuster defied the negative press to become a huge hit that lead stars tom cruise and brad pitt should be more proud of, article bookmarked.

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I t was a dreary November in London and Brad Pitt was tired of hanging upside down. So he called his friend and, later, employer – studio mogul David Geffen. How much would it cost to step away from his commitments and take the next flight home? Geffen smiled like an affable shark. “Forty million,” he replied. This would include the lawsuit that would inevitably come the actor’s way when he walked out on the job. Pitt groaned. But he stayed.

Interview with the Vampire , with a budget of $60m (£47m), was one of the biggest productions the then 30-year-old heartthrob had ever taken on. However, the Neil Jordan adaptation of Anne Rice’s bloody bonkbuster, which turns 25 today, was to prove more challenging than Pitt had ever suspected. For the first and last time in his career, he was on the brink of quitting.

Rice and Jordan had collaborated on the script and were determined to do justice to this sprawling tale of a glum bloodsucker (Pitt) unburdening himself to a curious reporter (Christian Slater, a last-minute replacement for the late River Phoenix). And yes, it’s true: to ensure Pitt and his co-star Tom Cruise looked as if they’d been reposing in coffins, they were required to hang upside down for 30 minutes at a time. That was the length required for the blood to drain from their faces and a vampiric pallor to seep through.

It wasn’t just the ridiculous contortions that were getting to Pitt. As vampires cannot abide sunlight, the entire film was assembled at night. During the New Orleans segment of the production, this wasn’t a deal breaker. Sad Brad had zipped around the French Quarter during the day on his motorbike, soaking up the swampy Louisiana rays. Then came winter in London and endless wee hours shoots at Pinewood Studios.

“Six months in the f***ing dark,” Pitt later lamented to Entertainment Weekly . “We got to London, and London was f***ing dark. London was dead of winter. We’re shooting in Pinewood (Studios), which is an old institution – all the James Bond films.

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“There are no windows in there. It hasn’t been refabbed in decades. You leave for work in the dark – you go into this cauldron, this mausoleum – and then you come out and it’s dark. I’m telling you, one day it broke me. It was like, ‘Life’s too short for this quality of life’.”

But, while Pitt languished in despair, for Tom Cruise things were looking up. The world’s biggest movie star was delighted to discover that making Interview with the Vampire was considerably more straightforward than the hype that had preceded it. It is easily forgotten today just how much of a phenomenon the Rice novels were through the the Eighties and Nineties. She was a sort of sexually overheated JK Rowling, with Cruise’s degenerate character of Lestat de Lioncourt fulfilling the Harry Potter role (Louis was more a Hermione and Ron Weasley rolled into one).

Lestat ostensibly had a supporting part in the film as the vampire whose bite bestows immortality on the perpetually crestfallen Louis. But he was the true rock star in Rice’s universe: a swish European monster modelled on the Dutch actor Rutger Hauer.

Nobody would confuse Tom Cruise for a degenerate Riviera sophisticate – not even on a dimly lit sound-stage outside Slough. And there had been outrage when the all-American flyboy was unveiled in the role.

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Front and centre of the backlash was Rice herself. In the months before filming, she undertook a public campaign distancing herself from Cruise. Bad enough that her first preference, Daniel Day-Lewis , had turned down the part, reportedly because he’d had enough of costume drama. The real insult lay in the studio’s refusal to entertain her suggestion of Jeremy Irons and to instead go straight to the star of such baroque epics as Top Gun and Cocktail .

Day-Lewis wasn’t the only one to give a polite “fangs but no fangs” to Interview with the Vampire . Ridley Scott and David Cronenberg were approached with view to directing but politely declined. And so Geffen came knocking on the door of third choice Neil Jordan, whose mastery of the sexually fluid Crying Game was seen as the perfect qualification for wrangling randy vampires.

All of this was breathlessly reported in the press, leading to mutterings that the project was doomed before it even began. So by the time Cruise and Pitt got to London, the former was simply glad to be working. In the isolation of Pinewood, he no longer had to deal with pitch-fork wielding fans demanding he be replaced.

The outcry had stunned him, without question. Cruise has rarely deviated from his public persona of chipper A-type. Yet the pushback to his Lestat casting came as a jolt, as he openly admitted at the time.

“When it first hit, it really hurt my feelings, to be candid about it,” he told Esquire . “Her [Rice’s] venom hurt… You don’t usually start a movie with someone not wanting you to do it. That’s unusual.”

David Geffen, who had campaigned for years to bring the novel to the screen, had led the counter-offensive against Rice. “Anne is a difficult woman at best, and what her motives are remains somewhat beyond me,” he said. “But for her to attack this movie for her own self-importance, when she has been paid $2m (£1.5m) [in rights] and stands to make a lot more money selling her books, is just capricious. It lacks kindness. It lacks discretion. And it lacks professionalism.”

In Rice’s defence, Tom Cruise playing a decadent Euro-trash vampire was at the time generally received as one of the mis-castings of the century. How wrong she and we all were. Twenty-five years on, Interview with the Vampire is an indisputable hoot.

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Yes, the plot is all over the place. We join Pitt’s miserable Louis as he recounts to Slater’s interviewer his tragic progress from the realm of the living to the undead in 18th-century Louisiana, and the endless decades he since spent wandering the earth. It isn’t much of a story, more a sequence of loosely interconnected set-pieces.

Louis is bitten by Lestat, who asks whether he wishes to die or become a vampire. In a pathetic attempt to bring meaning to their hollow lives, they “adopt” 11-year -old-vampire Claudia (Kirsten Dunst in her first screen performance). Later, the unhappy family is split violently apart and there is a run-in in Paris with Antonio Banderas’s A-typer vamp, Armand.

Louis stumbles through it all passively and glumly. You can see genuine horror in Pitt’s eyes as he is forced to deliver his lines in a cadaverous monotone, so that he sounds like a Sisters Of Mercy fan desperately needing a decent night’s sleep.

Yet Interview with the Vampire is also gloriously barking and that’s largely due to Cruise’s wild performance. You truly would have to be as dead inside as Louis is to not enjoy a film that culminates with Tom Cruise in a vampire wig ripping Christian Slater’s throat out and driving into the night to the strains of Guns N’ Roses covering “Sympathy for the Devil”. It is one of the ultimate Cruise moments.

Rice was the first to recognise the error of her ways. The instant she clapped eyes on Cruise as Lestat she saw the light. Later, she even took out ads in the Hollywood trade magazines acknowledging her error. But if she had taken the film incredibly personally, it was for understandable reasons. Rice had started the novel in 1973 from the bottom of an ocean of grief following the death of her five-year-old daughter from leukaemia.

It would spawn endless fan fiction, which is appropriate as, in a way, Rice was writing a fan fiction version of her own life. Louis and Claudia were her and her daughter. In truth, though, the popularity of the book owed less to its autobiographical ache than to the homo-erotic pulsations between Louis and Lestat.

Vampirism has long been served as metaphor for all sorts of forbidden passions. Rice amped the subtext all the way up. This carried through to the movie: there’s a weird charge as Cruise, as Lestat, begins nibbling on Pitt’s neck and offers to either end his suffering or sweep Louis away to life everlasting. He does so both tenderly and ravenously.

Rice was, however, a canny business person as well as heartbroken author. The novel was optioned before publication, but languished for decades. Her suspicion was that the erotic tingle between Lestat and Louis was putting producers off. So she suggested gender-flipping either or both characters.

Cher and Anjelica Houston were her suggestions for the Louis part. But when Geffen asked her to write the screenplay, she instead settled on giving Louis a wife, to make clear his heterosexuality.

Oddly, her radical changes were met with resistance. Geffen and Jordan wanted to be more, not less, faithful to the novel. In the end, Jordan re-wrote Rice’s re-write, putting back in chunks of the book (and was miffed subsequently not to receive a screenwriting credit). He had restored, he said, “the little girl, and the blood, and the sex”.

He wasn’t the only one who seemed to understand, almost better than Rice, where the appeal of Interview with the Vampire lay. It was Cruise who understood that although Lestat was in many ways the villain of the piece – unlike the guilt-ridden Louis, he preys with impunity on humans – the character did not perceive his actions in those terms. Asked how it felt to play a bad guy for the first time, Cruise would shake his head. Lestat saw himself as the hero – saviour to Louis and protector of their “daughter” Claudia. It’s one of his smartest performances.

“I used the book as a reference for me,” Cruise said. “You have to read [it]... very carefully to find the clues to who Lestat is… his loneliness and his personal struggle. He recognises that Louis is a unique being. Lestat gives him the choice: that’s something I felt very strongly about. He’s really asking Louis, ‘Do you still want to die.. ?’”

Outside Rice’s considerable fanbase, nobody quite knew what to make of Interview with the Vampire when it flapped its way to cinemas on 11 November 1994 (it would reach the UK the following January). The era of the all-conquering franchises was still decades away. So the film was received as a curio, albeit a sumptuous one starring Hollywood’s two biggest male leads.

Still, the murmurings were generally positive. It was bonkers – but it felt like the right sort of bonkers. “ Interview with the Vampire promises a constantly surprising vampire story, and it keeps that promise,” said The New York Times . Rice loved it too. “I was lucky I had Neil Jordan, and the movie was incredibly faithful to the book.”

It was a decent-sized hit, to boot. The film grossed $224m (£175m) globally on its $60m (£47m) budget. Still, the lingering perception was that everyone involved was slumming it slightly. Pitt, as fast as his little A-lister legs would carry him, fled London to make Seven with David Fincher. Tom Cruise sought reinvention as an action hero in the original Mission: Impossible . By unspoken agreement, neither ever mentioned Interview with the Vampire again. Figuratively, they tossed it in a coffin and bunged it in a hole.

And yet, a quarter of a century on, it glitters gaudily in both their CVs. The film is ridiculous but such a blast. It furthermore functions as ghostly foreshadowing of the superhero craze. Here are two of the great idols of the age giving themselves utterly, without irony, to a tale of caped weirdos defying the laws of the universe. They should be prouder of it and of the splash it created.

“Vampires are metaphors for all the uneasiness we have about other things,” Jordan pondered later. “The week this movie opened there were about 40 people across the United States who cut somebody else and drank their blood. They seem to believe in them.”

“Cruise gave Lestat life,” says Erin Chapman, of the Vampire Studies Association, which has at its mission to “establish vampire studies as a multidisciplinary field by promoting, disseminating and publishing contributions to vampire scholarship”.

“Lestat comes across as evil, but you get small glimpses of humanity, protruding from his dark soul. He seeks companionship and who wouldn’t after centuries of existence?… The movie encompasses general themes of the book such as good versus evil, love and immortality, and intertwines it all with a supernatural world. Despite the main characters being vampires, they just want what humans want – to be loved.“

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Interview With the Vampire review – Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt’s brilliant bloodsucking bromance

Neil Jordan’s horror-comedy features Cruise in scene-chewing form in a film that outrageously explores the vampire’s actually rather complex lived experience

‘Y ou have no idea how few vampires have the stamina for immortality!” Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt bring the staying power in Neil Jordan’s entirely outrageous horror-comedy bromance, produced by Stephen Woolley and adapted for the screen by Anne Rice from her own bestseller, now rereleased for its 30-year anniversary. The histrionic energy and ambition, operatic pathos and dapper, jaunty offensiveness are undimmed. Succeeding decades have only increased the film’s fanbase. I remember a dinner at the Edinburgh film festival with Catherine Breillat, director of Romance and Anatomy of Hell, as she discoursed with passion on how she adored it.

It is now almost mandatory with people of a certain age to claim that a certain masterpiece of their salad days “couldn’t be made now”. But … two hottie vampires who contrive to apply a sexualised bite-kiss to a 12-year-old girl (Kirsten Dunst – a performance for the ages) … and that girl becomes as worldly as any depraved grownup and travels with our two heroes through the night-time fleshpots as a daughter or stepdaughter or (sort of) platonic lover? Erm, which year was that ever OK for, again?

Christian Slater plays Malloy, a journalist roaming around modern-day San Francisco searching out likely looking bohemian types to interview for his life-in-the-city reportage. He chances across an elegant, watchful young fellow called Louis (Pitt) who takes him back to his tiny rented room and (once the tape recorder is switched on) tells him he is a vampire, over 200 years old, a former slave master and plantation owner in 18th-century Louisiana, longing for death after the loss of his wife and child. Perhaps something in the parasitism and spiritual death of slavery attracted the attention of Lestat (Tom Cruise), a sensualist vampire with a cruel twist to his sanguine lips. Naturally, Cruise can’t help making his Lestat hyperactive, super-focused and frustrated at others’ lack of discipline and commitment, and his performance is hilarious, a glorious comic turn of the sort he never tried again. Lestat befriends Louis, intuits his pain, offers him a chance to start again in eternal life, delivers his fangs to Louis’ neck and welcomes him to the vampire brotherhood.

Lestat-Louis is an occult teacher-pupil relationship that Brad Pitt was to duplicate five years later in Fight Club, only with himself in the alpha role. But Louis has squeamish qualms about living off human blood, timidly at first preferring only that of animals, to Lestat’s genial contempt. The two of them are to get in an adorable two-bloodsucking-fiends-and-baby (or rather girl) situation when they find Claudia (Kirsten Dunst), orphaned by the plague, and the poor child gets to be one of them. They find themselves in Paris where a nest of vampires led by Armand (Antonio Banderas) and Santiago (Stephen Rea) run a secret theatre of cruelty, patronised by the beau monde, in which they pretend to be humans playing vampires, killing real victims on stage: meta-vampire snuff horror.

So what is it like being a vampire, Malloy asks Louis? Is it all Dracula, crucifixes, garlic etc? Louis dismisses all this as “the vulgar fictions of a demented Irishman!” (Well really, Anne Rice! Is that any way to talk about Abraham “Bram” Stoker, the creator of Dracula and populariser of the entire vampire genre?) But what the film makes so brilliantly clear is that the vampire’s lived experience is in fact a complex business. It varies from vampire to vampire. Louis himself has a romantic, almost idealist concept of vampirism, entranced, in his pained way, by the eternity of longing; whereas cruel Lestat just lives in a permanent state of greed.

At first it seems as if Louis finds a kindred spirit and even love with Armand in Paris on this basis, but is finally repelled by the abysmal cynicism and disillusion that Armand’s Euro-vampirism represents. Louis is a modern vampire, full of democratic openness, a vampire of the American enlightenment. He even frees his slaves and burns down the big house – to Lestat’s petulant rage. Interview With the Vampire is still horribly exciting, shocking and funny.

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The Untold Truth Of Interview With The Vampire

In the 21st century, you can't flip through three TV channels without coming across a vampire; back in the '90s, however, things were very different. 

By the mid-90s, the vampire genre was scraping the bottom of its barrel, somewhere between pirates and Westerns. It had been decades since Dracula became a cinematic icon, and it would be many years until "True Blood," "The Vampire Diaries," "Twilight" and others would make bloodsucking cool again. But then a trifecta came to pass, one featuring a hit film (1992's "Bram Stoker's Dracula"), a critically-acclaimed film (1993's "Cronos"), and arguably the most eagerly-anticipated film of its year (1994's "Interview With the Vampire"). Of course, much of the progress these films made was undone by Eddie Murphy's 1995 bomb "Vampire in Brooklyn," but that's a story for a different article.

The fact of the matter is, good fang fests were hard to come by. Which is why, when "Interview with the Vampire" was optioned and Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt attached to a script by author Anne Rice herself, it seemed like a delicious prospect. Add in "The Crying Game" director Neil Jordan and a sumptuous, decadent couple hours was assured. 

But things rarely turn out the way the world expects. From casting spats to rewrites and miserable actors, "Interview" barely made it to the screen at all. In the end, the film was indeed a hit, and as it approaches a milestone 30th anniversary, it is still so fondly remembered that it seems like the perfect time to look back on the film's top-secret details — some unsettling enough to make Lestat himself flash a pointy grin.

Make-upside down

However you feel about the casting, the level of gore, or the way the book was adapted, there's one thing everyone agrees on: The vampires (with the exception of Tom Cruise's hair) look great. 

Oscar-winning makeup and special effects whiz  Stan Winston  captured the characters' vampiric essence. Weird glowy eyes? Check. Fangs that make talking even harder than usual for Brad Pitt? Check. But the piece de resistance of the entire vampire shebang has to be their delicately translucent skin.

If "Interview" was being made today, all that lovely vampiric stuff would most likely be CGI'd in during post-production. But this was the '90s, which meant hard contact lenses, fake fangs and painted-on veins . Winston came up with a truly unique method of ensuring that those delicate veins were accurate. Yes, accurate.

Believe it or not, every vein you can see on Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise's faces are actually their own veins . Winston (the late mastermind behind "T2," "Jurassic Park, "Aliens" and too many other classics to name) achieved this effect by making them hang upside down — a la David from "The Lost Boys" — for 30 minutes before starting the makeup process. Why? The rush of blood to the actor's head made their veins pop, allowing them to be more easily traced and painted. 

Anne Rice didn't want Tom Cruise

Back in 1994, it was big news that Anne Rice was vehemently opposed to Tom Cruise portraying her beloved Lestat de Lioncourt. But the story of how Cruise did it anyway is one of Hollywood's more bizarre tales. 

Rice originally sold the film rights to "Interview" back in the ' 70s . At the time, she had visions of Rutger Hauer or, somehow, John Travolta in the title role. Things can move exceptionally slowly in Tinseltown, however. By the time an adaptation finally got off the ground, both actors were considered too mature for the part. 

Rice was far more interested in '90s possibilities like Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich and Tom Actual Hanks for the part. When the studio went with Cruise against her advice, Rice made her feelings known. To anyone who would listen. 

Here's how she described Cruise's casting to the L.A. Times : "[Cruise] is no more my vampire Lestat than Edward G. Robinson is Rhett Butler." 

She even went so far as to ask that Cruise and Brad Pitt just switch roles. But as Rice explained to Movieline in 1994 , "They just don't listen to me." 

Anne Rice came around

After having been so vocal in her opposition during production, Rice's opinions about Cruise did a complete 180 just in time for opening night. In fact, upon seeing the completed film that she dubbed a " masterpiece ", the author seemed completely under the spell of Cruise's Lestat. 

So contrite was Rice that she took out a full page ad in Vanity Fair  to apologize. Decades later the author (who published her 13th "Vampire Chronicles" novel in 2018) was still attempting to explain her change of heart. In a 2009 interview , she reasoned: "I was too shocked at the beginning and I was very much against [Cruise's casting. But] I think Tom did a wonderful job, I really do."

"[Tom] got the essence of Lestat. He got Lestat's power," she continued. "He got his charisma and his charm. He got them all across in the movie ... he had great skill in that performance." 

While for the most part audiences agreed, there was one very important viewer who wasn't impressed: Oprah. The '90s talk show titan hated "Interview" so much, in fact, that she walked out of a screening in the first ten minutes . She then almost cancelled a Cruise appearance on her show because of how bloody the film was, explaining: 'I believe there are forces of light and darkness in the world, and I don't want to be a contributor to the force of darkness." Tom Cruise did in fact appear on Oprah's show, offering up a four-word response: "It's a vampire movie!"

The shoot broke Brad Pitt and he tried to run away

Brad Pitt made no secret of the fact that he found the entire "Interview" experience deeply unsettling. 

Years later, when an Entertainment Weekly reporter said he looked miserable during the shoot, he replied : "I am miserable. Six months in the f***ing dark, contact lenses, makeup ... London was dead of winter. We're shooting in Pinewood. There's no windows in there." 

In 2011, he once again looked back on the experience with something less than enthusiasm. "You go to work in the dark. You go to this cauldron, this mausoleum, and then you come out and it's dark. One day, it broke me." 

Having been pushed to his darkness/contacts/gravity boots limit, the star took decisive action. He told EW , "I called David Geffen, who was a producer. I said, 'I can't do this anymore. I can't do it. How much will it take to get me out?'

The actor went on, "[Geffen] goes, very calmly, 'Forty million dollars.'" So whether he liked it or not, Pitt stuck it out until the bitter end. And while he may have  r eferred to the film as " the shoot from hell ," he would add that it was "worth every minute of it. We got a great movie out of it."

Anne Rice wasn't the only screenwriter

Although Rice had written lots of versions of the script for "Interview" over the years, '94's was different. A little too different, in fact, as far as the author was concerned. 

"I've had a good relationship with [producer] David Geffen, although it's kind of iffy right now," she told Movieline about ten months before the film's release. "When I was working on the script for 'Interview,' I told him I wanted to do exactly what I wanted to do with it. And that's the way I wrote it. [Director] Neil Jordan has rewritten it, and they are putting his name on the credits, and I don't know if you know, but the WGA will only allow a director to share writing credit if he brings over 50% original material. I don't know if he's done that or not. Maybe he has."

As it turns out, Jordan did not receive a writing credit, and Rice was the only credited writer on the final film. 

Anne Rice posted her own extensive notes in 1994 on the movie and everyone involved,  sounding as if she had largely forgiven Jordan for any transgressions and saw the film's final product as a success.

"Whatever Neil Jordan's comments to the press, he seemed to believe in that and to make it work on the screen," she wrote. "The film is one which the audience starts talking about, discussing, arguing before they ever leave the theatre. The film invites analysis. It invites a return viewing. It makes a difference to the people who see it."

Brad Pitt spent a lot of time in a ditch

As we all know, Tom Cruise is famous for many, many things. But being tall is definitely not one of them. As his success shows, though, height is no indicator of talent. Unless that is, you're playing a vampire that is six feet tall . 

Since Pitt is 5'11" and Cruise is  5'7 ," the production team came up with some ingenious ways to balance out that not-so-subtle height discrepancy.

The simplest solution, it seems, was to put heels on Cruise's shoes. But as "Drag Race" had yet to be invented, having the star totter around in five inch heels just wouldn't have worked. 

Which meant that other solutions — and a shorter heel  — were necessary. So Cruise occasionally stood on specially-constructed platforms in scenes with Pitt. But then, production also came up with a third option.  

They dug ditches , and Pitt stood in them while acting out scenes opposite Cruise. So, imagine one iconic Hollywood legend wearing platform shoes and the other standing in a ditch, and them both trying to act out impossibly dramatic moments while wearing fake pointy teeth and ponytails, and you have some idea of what was going on behind the scenes of "Vampire" on a daily basis. When you consider such things, it's amazing the film turned out as good as it did.

Cruise went Full Tom Cruise during pre-production

We all know that Tom Cruise can be a bit gung-ho when it comes to preparing for a role. Stunt work, aircraft piloting, so very much running ... the list is endless. But where "Interview" was concerned, Cruise found a whole new level of going for it. 

The superstar saw Rice's savaging of his casting as a challenge. As he told Esquire  at the time, "You don't usually start a movie with someone not wanting you to do it. That's unusual."

Describing his reaction to Rice's criticism, Cruise went on, "When it first hit, it really hurt, to be candid about it. Her venom hurt." 

His way of dealing with that venom, it seems, was to do everything in his power to prove her wrong. To start with, he read all the books, saying , "You have to read [the source material] very carefully to find the clues to who Lestat is." He changed his diet and exercise regime to drop 12 pounds for the role. He moved to Paris. He even learned to play the piano. But perhaps the most useful — and deeply unpleasant — research involved watching film of lions hunting zebras in the wild. In Cruise's opinion, Lestat wasn't evil, he was merely amoral, hunting food to survive. He just wore a fabulous frock coat to do it.

Brad Pitt could have been Cher

Back in 1994, "Interview" was an envelope-pushing film. As it turns out, Rice wanted to push it even further.

During the movie's development, Rice and her editor, Vicki Wilson , hit on a radical plot twist: What if Louis was actually, say, Louise?

The pitch went something like this: Louis was in fact a woman dressed as a man, essentially a transvestite. Back in the dark ages, the film would explain, women couldn't own or run a business. So, to keep the plantation, she had taken on the persona and role of a man. Other than that small detail, Wilson told Movieline , "It was exactly the same as 'Interview with the Vampire'." 

Who did Rice and Wilson have pegged for the newly-tweaked main role? None other than Cherilyn Sarkisian herself, Cher.

Given that the " Vampire Chronicles" TV show is about to be a reality, and the times we live in would seem to be more welcoming of such a twist, perhaps a gender swap of the character could still happen. 

Christian Slater stepped in after the death of River Phoenix

With a production already beset by public animosity between writer, director and star, you'd think things had reached a nadir for the "Interview" crew. But, on October 31, 1993 , River Phoenix's death at age 23 forced the production to scramble once again. 

"We lost River. Literally a week before he was supposed to come in, he passed away," Pitt told EW in 2008. "It was a horrible moment." 

Phoenix's passing meant that not only had the production lost a friend and colleague, they had also lost their Malloy, the reporter who conducts the eponymous interview. Which meant that someone had to take Phoenix's place. 

During a 2008 chat with Venice  magazine, Christian Slater admitted it was a difficult role to take, reflecting on the unease he felt at the time. "(Phoenix's death) was tragic ... It was really awkward to be stepping into that kind of scenario." He went on, "I think I eased my own discomfort by not accepting money and donating it to (Phoenix's) charities." The actor  gave away his entire $250,000 salary to EarthSave and Earth Trust .

Kirsten Dunst thought kissing Brad Pitt was disgusting

To an army of loyal fans over the last several decades, the notion of kissing Brad Pitt might sound like a moment for life's highlight reel. But although Dunst's character Claudia looked like a ten-year-old girl, she was supposed to be nearly 40 years old — even though in real life, Dunst obviously was the former. 

As it turned out, there needed to be a kissing scene between Dunst and Pitt — who at the time was 29. In 2013, she explained her repugnance to Bullet magazine. 

"It was just a peck," Dunst reasoned. "I remember Brad would watch lots of 'Real World' episodes . He had this long hair. He was just a hippie-ish cool dude. Everyone at the time was like, 'you're so lucky you kissed Brad Pitt,' but I thought it was disgusting. I didn't kiss anyone else until I was 16, I think. I was a late bloomer."

Kirsten Dunst auditioned twice

These days, Kirsten Dunst is a confident, assured acting veteran. But back in 1994, things were a little different. 

So different in fact, we could have seen a Claudia with the face of Anne Hathaway or Christian Ricci were it not for one very confident adult. Listening in on ten-year-old Dunst as she bombed her initial audition (he was sitting just outside the room), Dunst's acting coach persuaded her not to give up just yet. As she explained to Variety in 2016, "He knew I didn't nail it. And I walked out and he was like, 'No, you go back in there.'"

Apologizing to all present, the coach explained: "She didn't do what she can do." So, Dunst got a second chance to impress and went on to land the role. In the eyes of many, Dunst's work has become iconic, and it propelled her career to a new level — even if she wouldn't be able to watch "Interview" for several years. Because she was so young at the time, Dunst's parents  banned her from watching the film.

Robotic Tom Cruise

Some might assume this section title refers to his acting — but in actuality, there was a robotic element to Tom Cruise's performance. 

During Claudia's first attempt to rid herself of Lestat, she clumsily slashes his throat. He then proceeds to bleed excessively and, for some reason, melt. If you were assuming these were physical effects, you'd be partially right. None of it was CGI'd. But what you saw was also not Tom Cruise rolling around and melting during that scene.

The movie's $70 million budget included money for an animatronic Tom Cruise . It was built to have realistic-looking masks placed on it, sculpted to look like his face and melted at will. All these years later, if you want to play Stan Winston yourself, you're just one transaction away from y our own Lestat latex mask  — which would allow you to recreate the actor's grisly demise at your leisure. 

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How old was Tom Cruise in the movie Interview with the Vampire?

Tom Cruise was 31 in Interview with the Vampire when he played the character 'Lestat de Lioncourt'.

That was over 29 years ago in 1994.

Today he is 61 , and has starred in 86 movies in total, 62 of those since Interview with the Vampire was released.

How old do you think he looks in the movie?

In Interview with the Vampire, I think Tom Cruise looks:

Did you know?

• Director Neil Jordan has worked with Tom Cruise just once in his career.
• Tom Cruise's first movie was as 'Billy' in Endless Love, released in 1981 when he was 18
• Interview with the Vampire scores 7.38 out of 10 on TMDB .

The cast of Interview with the Vampire

Tom Cruise's other movies

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The cast of ‘interview with the vampire,’ then and now.

In anticipation of the movie's 25th anniversary, The Hollywood Reporter checks in with the actors who starred in 'Interview With the Vampire,' including Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Kirsten Dunst.

By Harper Lambert

Harper Lambert

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In 1994, director Neil Jordan and screenwriter Anne Rice gave fans of Interview With the Vampire an adaptation to sink their teeth into. Based on Rice's 1976 novel of the same name, the drama-horror was headlined by a star-studded cast that included Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Christian Slater. It also featured early performances by actors who would go on to achieve major success, such as Thandie Newton and Kirsten Dunst.

Made on a $60 million budget, the film grossed more than $223 million worldwide and had the top weekend box office opening of 1994. Positive critical reviews helped Interview With the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles  land Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for best original score, art direction and supporting actress. 

Nov. 11, 2019 marks 25 years since the cult classic hit theaters. In anticipation of the movie's silver anniversary, The Hollywood Reporter checks in with the actors who breathed life into the dead and undead characters of Interview With the Vampire.

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Today one of Hollywood's biggest A-listers, Brad Pitt toiled in obscurity for years before playing heartthrob J.D. in 1991's Thelma and Louise. After starring in a few poorly received films, his career took off with Robert Redford's A River Runs Through It. His performances in True Romanc e (alongside Interview co-star Christian Bale) and Interview With the Vampire confirmed his status as a rising star.

In the film, Pitt plays Louis, a bereaved plantation owner who is turned into a vampire by Lestat. Though Pitt has described the shoot as "miserable," it led to appearances in Se7en and Two Monkeys the following year. For the latter, he received a Golden Globe for best supporting actor and his first of five Oscar nominations.

In the early 2000s, he expanded into action films with Ocean's Eleven, Troy and Mr. and Mrs. Smith. He also co-founded a production company, Plan B Entertainment. From Moneyball to The Big Short to 12 Years a Slave, for which he won an Oscar, Pitt has found as much success as a producer as he has an actor.

From comedies to dramas to everything in between, his body of work spans a wide range of genres. In 2019, he reunited with Inglourious Basterds director Quentin Tarantino for box office hit Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.  Pitt most recently hit the big screen in  Ad Astra , which premiered at the 2019 Venice Film Festival before its theatrical release this fall.

Tom Cruise, the cast's biggest name at the time, starred in Interview With the Vampire 10 years after catapulting to fame in Risky Business. As Lestat de Lioncourt, a sadistic vampire, Cruise plays the film's main antagonist. His casting followed a hot streak of critical and box office smashes, including Top Gun (1986), Rain Man (1988) and A Few Good Men (1992). His portrayal of a paraplegic Vietnam War veteran in Born on the Fourth of July (1989) garnered immense praise and a best actor nod from the Academy. However, Anne Rice publicly opposed Cruise's casting in Interview With the Vampire , insisting that he and Brad Pitt swap roles.

Interview was followed by a slew of other hits in the late '90s, like Jerry Maguire, Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia  and the first of several Mission: Impossible films. In the early '90s, Cruise and former casting agent Paula Wagner created Cruise/Wagner Productions, which produced many of his major projects.

From 2000 and on, Cruise has mostly starred in big-budget action flicks ( Minority Report, War of the Worlds, Jack Reacher, Edge of Tomorrow ) and thrillers ( Collateral, Lions for Lambs, Valkyrie ). In 2020, he will reprise his role in Top Gun: Maverick and has been confirmed to return for the seventh and eighth installments of the Mission: Impossible franchise.

Kirsten Dunst

Not to be outshone by her more seasoned castmates, Kirsten Dunst was Interview With the Vampire's breakout star. At just 11 years old, she beat out the likes of Natalie Portman and Evan Rachel Wood for the role of Claudia, a dying orphan whom Lestat transforms into a vampire. For her gripping performance, Dunst was given her first Golden Globe nomination. That same year, she received rave reviews for playing Amy in Little Women. A string of comedic roles followed, among them 1997's Wag the Dog opposite Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, 1999's Drop Dead Gorgeous  and 2000's Bring It On.

She proved her dramatic chops playing a child prostitute on  ER and starring in Peter Bogdanovich's The Cat's Meow. Along with box office hits such as the Tobey Maguire-led Spider-Man, Dunst has received considerable praise for her performances in independent features like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Melancholia . She frequently collaborates with writer-director Sofia Coppola, appearing in all but two of her films.

Dunst scored a second Golden Globe nomination for her work in the anthology series Fargo . Currently, she stars in Showtime's On Becoming a God in Central Florida.

Christian Slater

Until four weeks before shooting began, River Phoenix was set to play Malloy, a journalist who interviews Louis about his life story. When Phoenix died unexpectedly, Christian Slater replaced him and donated his salary to Phoenix's favorite charities.

Like his co-stars, Slater was well-known prior to appearing in Interview With the Vampire. As a child, he acted in Broadway productions and soap operas before playing young outlaw Binx Davey in 1985's The Legend of Billie Jean. Slater shot to fame when he appeared opposite Winona Ryder as J.D. in 1988's Heathers . The dark comedy's success led to a slew of film roles, such as the lead in the Quentin Tarantino-penned True Romance and an outlaw in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

Following Interview With the Vampire, Slater worked in multiple genres, from big-budget thrillers like Broken Arrow to romantic dramas like Bed of Roses. In the 2000s, Slater earned spots in hit television shows The West Wing, Alias and The Forgotten and lent his voice to animated characters in Robot Chicken and Archer . He was awarded a Golden Globe in 2015 for playing the eponymous role in Mr. Robot, which he also produces.

Thandie Newton

After making her debut in 1991's Flirting , Newton won a number of small parts, including Yvette in Interview With the Vampire. A house slave who is murdered by Cruise's Lestat, her character appears in the film only briefly.

Newton's career took off four years later, when she was cast as the lead in both Jonathan Demme's Beloved and Bernardo Bertolucci's Besieged . She reunited with her Interview assassin Cruise for Mission: Impossible II before taking on the silver screen as Makemba Likasu in ER . She won critical acclaim, including a BAFTA award, for her performance in the Oscar-winning Crash .

Splitting her time between television and film acting, Newton has played characters like Condoleezza Rice in 2008's W. and Val in last year's Solo: A Star Wars Story. In her most recent and most lauded role, Newton starred as robot-turned-rebel Maeve Millay in HBO's Westworld , for which she won an Emmy and two Golden Globe nominations. She will reprise her role in the futuristic drama's third season in 2020.

Antonio Banderas

Rounding out the supporting cast is Antonio Banderas as Armand, ringleader of the Parisian vampire coven. Prior to Interview With the Vampire, the actor/singer/producer appeared in several Spanish films throughout the 1980s. He broke into Hollywood after director Pedro Almodóvar cast him in several projects, including the critically acclaimed Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!  More recognition came from playing Tom Hanks' love interest in the 1993 AIDS drama Philadelphia .

From the late '90s to the early 2000s, Banderas worked across various genres, from action movies Assassins and The Mask of Zorro to thrillers like Femme Fatale to musicals like Evita . His work in the Broadway musical Nine garnered him a Tony Award nomination. Banderas also voiced the swashbuckling feline Puss in Boots in multiple sequels and spinoffs of the Shrek franchise.

This year, he reunited with Almodóvar for Pain and Glory , nabbing the Cannes Film Festival award for best actor. 

Stephen Rea

A few years after scoring an Oscar nomination for best actor, Stephen Rea reunited with his Crying Game director Neil Jordan for Interview With the Vampire . In it, he plays Santiago, a mind-reading vampire whom Claudia and Louis encounter in Paris.

A veteran of Irish and English theater, Rea appeared in several stage and television productions before gaining international fame for his role in The Crying Game. Since then, he has worked consistently in film and television. Of his 130-plus performances, notable credits include Finch in V for Vendetta , Lieutenant Viktor Burakov in Citizen X  and Sir Hugh Hayden-Hoyle in the TV miniseries The Honourable Woman, for which he won a best supporting actor BAFTA award.

Rea is now working on two new TV series: The Stranger and Flesh & Blood.

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'Interview With The Vampire' Review: A Masterful Outlook on Immortality

As Collider revisits the cult classic catalogue, a 'Twilight' fan uncovers the roots of the vampire obsession.

Immortality has never looked so appealing and haunting at the same time. As someone who grew up with the notion that the Twilight saga and The Vampire Diaries were the ultimate blood thirsting examples to avouch for, watching the 1994 adaptation of Interview With the Vampire was an enlightening experience. Going into this gothic tale without much background knowledge about its story other than the fact that some of Hollywood's top-notch actors starred in it, I was captivated by Louis' ( Brad Pitt ) tragic recounting of his life post death. More specifically, I was drawn to how this film presents a non-idealistic portrayal of what it means to be young, beautiful, and ageless forever.

"So you want me to tell you the story of my life?" It is with this simple question that viewers are introduced to one of the films' protagonists, a so-called vampire who struggles to balance the remainder of his humanity with his urge to suck some fresh blood. Challenged by his prey to casually unveil the lengthy chapters of his 200-year journey on tape, the character takes a trip down memory lane. Before his transformation, Louis was a plantation owner living a dubious reality in which he awaited death to knock on his door. Little did he know that Lestat ( Tom Cruise ), a non-remorseful vampire that happens to read minds, would hear his prayer and reward (or punish) him with the choice to opt for a slow death or eternal youth and beauty. With only a few seconds on the clock to come up with a decision before it's too late, Louis says "yes" to Lestat's compelling proposition to remain alive.

Although the set of rules may diverge from the vampires present in this narrative to those in pop culture nowadays, the dread for dining on human blood and having to withstand the burden of time is a characteristic that continues to be universal. While Lestat has shed any glimpse of compassion for the living, Louis is plagued with the desire to kill an entire village when he tries as much as possible to resist the temptation. In one of his moments of weakness, he bites a young girl's neck and feels an instantaneous sorrow. Yet, Lestat gives the girl (Claudia, played by Kirsten Dunst ) the opportunity to become one of them and be the child that neither vampire had. At first, she quickly conforms to the "killing for living" reality, but later on she is much more drawn to the parental figure that has more redemptive qualities.

RELATED: ‘Interview With the Vampire’ Shows the Horror of Being a Child Vampire

The attention-grabbing script by Anne Rice , who is the author of the novel that inspired the film, keeps you engaged with the unsettling view of immortality that each character possesses. For Louis, it is hard to conform to the devil that he is now by nature. For Claudia, it is the dreadful notion that she will never grow past the 'playing with dolls' phase. For Lestat, it is the inability to comprehend both Louis and Claudia's view of eternal life as a life sentence. In a way, the reporter listening and recording the story represents the viewer and their thought process trying to come to their own conclusion about whether immortality would be worth considering. The power that the screenplay has to make you want to empathize with the monstrous figures at its core, is one of the reasons why this Neil Jordan -led project remains a cult classic.

In addition to the riveting telling of events, the acting is across the board electrifying. It is hard to believe that this was one of Dunst's earlier roles, given her easiness to tap into Claudia's angelical and devious sides. A standout scene from her is the one in which she finds out the real reason why she doesn't age. Cruise and Pitt are both remarkable at foiling each other's characters, making viewers despise one and fall for the other. Every time Lestat tries to lead his companion astray with the constant reminders that he is no longer human, the audience feels even more bitter about him. On the other hand, every time that Louis reflects on compassion, care, and humility (commendable human traits), viewers just sympathize with him that much more. Despite his limited appearance onscreen, it would be unfair to not cite Antonio Banderas wih an honorable mention when evaluating the ensemble's performance. He is both charming and mysterious as Armand, one of the few vampires to coexist with the main trio. The character plays a pivotal part in connecting the dots about the vampire history that Louis and Claudia long to know more about.

At the end, the audience never really uncovers the origin of these blood-craving creatures in the narrative, but they quickly grasp the meaning behind the common phrase "be careful with what you wish for." Although from the outside, vampires are attractive and almost never ponder the idea of death (other than their life as deadly beings), their qualities are a burden. Young and beautiful forever may sound like a nice saying on a t-shirt, but once you have the opportunity to really experience what that means, you will want what you will never have again. A family, the wrinkles forming from aging, and enjoying life as if there were no tomorrow. Quoting one of my favorite non-vampire films, "life moves on pretty fast, if you don't stop and look around you might miss it." Who would ever think that having this motto would be such a perk.

Overall, Interview With the Vampire is an exquisite analysis on what it means to wish for what you can't take back. Through a well-rounded storyline that challenges the viewer to consider every single perception portrayed onscreen, this film excels in never losing its train of thought. On the contrary, it utilizes its plot to reinforce the themes of youth, immortality, and values. Even if it doesn't come as a surprise that every cast member delivers a worthwhile performance, this is a major factor that contributes to viewers being invested in this tale from start to finish. As a first-time viewer, it served me well in looking at vampirism with loathing, instead of craving.

25 Juicy Secrets About Interview With the Vampire

In 1994's interview with the vampire , tom cruise, brad pitt and kirsten dunst sank their teeth into iconic roles created by author anne rice..

Tom Cruise had never played a villain before.

By 1994 he had been a reckless hot shot pilot, a hot shot bartender and a hot shot race car driver, all men who had caused other people, especially women, great angst. But he had yet to play an entirely nefarious creature.

Enter the opportunity to play the vampire Lestat.

Looking back, the pairing of Cruise and Brad Pitt  to bring the late  Anne Rice 's best-selling novel   Interview With the Vampire to life, so to speak, sounded like a slam-dunk idea, the biggest movie star on the planet teaming with the world's biggest heartthrob, former Sexiest Man Alive meets future Sexiest Man Alive, insert fangs. 

Yet that's not exactly how the saga began.

Cruise "is no more my Vampire Lestat than Edward G. Robinson is Rhett Butler," Rice told the Los Angeles Times back in 1993 when the lavish production being directed by Neil Jordan got underway, with executive producer David Geffen playing peacemaker between the disgruntled author and the leading man everyone else was excited about.

Obviously the show went on, Cruise approached the role of Lestat with the intensity he's known for bringing to every set he walked onto, Pitt fell in love with New Orleans, and it marked the breakthrough role of the wee Kirsten Dunst .

And ultimately Rice ended up very happy. 

In honor of the author, who died Dec. 11 at the age of 80, here are 25 things to know about how  Interview With the Vampire  made it from the page to the screen:

1. In the 1976 book Interview With the Vampire , the first in Anne Rice 's The Vampire Chronicles series as well as her first published novel, Lestat is described as "a tall, fair-skinned man with a mass of blond hair and a graceful, almost feline quality."

But hey, Jack Reacher is supposed to be 6-foot-5, and that worked out, right?

2. Rice had actually sold the rights to  Interview with the Vampire  all the way back in 1976, and Paramount initially offered the role of Lestat to John Travolta . As the years went by, Mel Gibson  and Richard Gere  were in the running in the 1980s, and then Daniel Day-Lewis  turned it down.

Studios "have millions and millions of dollars," Rice lamented during a book tour stop in Dallas in January 1993, a tad miffed because, she said, the studio had wanted to wait and see how  Francis Ford Coppola 's 1992 film  Bram Stoker's Dracula  did at the box office before committing to make  Interview With the Vampire . "They're making these movies that have a huge impact on America, and they're idiots. They're stumblebums."

3. Rice did like executive producer David Geffen , who had since acquired the rights, and she approved of  Neil Jordan  signing on to make the film, being a big fan of the Irish director's The Company of Wolves— which, incidentally, is said to be Lestat's favorite movie in  The Tale of the Body Thief , the fourth book in The Vampire Chronicles .

"I've had a good relationship with David Geffen, although it's kind of iffy right now," she told Movieline at the beginning of 1994. "When I was working on the script for Interview , I told him I wanted to do exactly what I wanted to do with it. And that's the way I wrote it. Neil Jordan has rewritten it, and they are putting his name on the credits, and I don't know if you know, but the WGA will only allow a director to share writing credit if he brings over 50 percent original material. I don't know if he's done that or not. Maybe he has."

4. The problem was that Rice had built up a very particular image of Lestat in her mind already. She said that she pictured the strapping Dutch actor Rutger Hauer  when she first created the character. So there was that, and it was apparent that she had a very specific vision.

" Jeremy Irons would have been fabulous," she told Movieline , swatting away the interviewer's comment that the British actor, then 45, was "too old." "He would have to have been made up to look younger," Rice said, "and he would have to have had wild blond hair, but he could have done it."

Rice also thought John Malkovich , then 40, could have done it, or Christopher Walken , having admired him as a blond villain in  Batman Returns . Julian Sands was high on her list as well.

5. And even when the production had its Lestat, Rice didn't stop wondering what might have been.

"I think Brad Pitt would be a fabulous Lestat," she told Movieline. "I tried for a long time to tell them that they should just reverse these roles—have Brad Pitt play Lestat and have Tom Cruise play Louis. Of course, they don't listen to me."

"Oh, the choice [of Cruise for Lestat] is just so bizarre. Yes, [Tom] could do Louis, he could do that part, the brooding, dark, guilt-ridden, passive, reflective, reactive thing."

As it was, "it's almost impossible to imagine how it's going to work," she added, "and it's really almost impossible to imagine how Neil and David and Tom could have come up with it. I have one question: Does Tom Cruise have any idea of what he's getting into?"

6. As it turned out, Cruise knew exactly what he was getting into and, though reportedly "deeply hurt" by Rice's initial criticism, he grabbed the role by the jugular, reading all of her books, learning piano, losing weight and soaking up the atmosphere in Paris with then-wife Nicole Kidman   to get a jump on Lestat's hedonistic lifestyle ahead of the start of production.  

Of the source material, which is told from Louis' point of view, "you have to read it very carefully to find the clues to who Lestat is," Cruise said in 1994 .

And in the end, he turned Rice—and, according to the author, he turned all the readers who were initially outraged just as she was.

"I think Tom did a wonderful job, I really do," she acknowledged in a 1994 interview . "I too was shocked in the beginning and I was very much against it, but Tom Cruise really did read the books, I think, and he got the essence of Lestat. He got Lestat's power and his charisma and his charm. He got all of that across in the movie. He had great skill in that performance, I think, and great power."

Rice noted that the only problem was that Cruise was too damn charming. "Since he isn't all that nasty, why does Louis hate Lestat? How can he?" she also mused in 1994 . "Well, I'll take that problem any day over a more shallow solution. Tom his the right note. And Louis was Louis. Nothing could comfort Louis. The film got it."

7. Early on, there was a whole potential other vampire universe on the table.

Rice's editor, Vicki Wilson , "really wanted Anjelica Huston to be Lestat," Rice told Movieline . "I wrote the script in which Cher   was supposed to play Louis, not Lestat [Geffen was supposedly all in on Cher]. Julia Phillips [producer and author of the infamous tell-all  You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again ] and I were developing that together, and the whole idea was that Louis would be a transvestite woman. At that time in history, you could own your own plantation and run things if you were a man, you couldn't if you were a woman. It was the French law. So this was a woman who dressed like a man, and otherwise it was exactly the same as Interview With the Vampire ."

(This version totally has to be in the works somewhere now, though, right?)

8. When  Kirsten Dunst 's Claudia is almost killed by Louis in 1794, Lestat turns her into one of their kind to give his generally miserable roommate something to remain undead for. The 10-year-old actress was the first actress to audition for the role.

"I was with my coach," Dunst recalled  in a 2016  Variety chat with Rami Malek . "He was outside of the room. He listened on the door to hear, like, what I was doing. And he knows I didn't nail it. And I walked out, and he was like, 'No, you go back in there.' He's like, 'Apologize to the casting director.' He's like, 'She didn't do what she can do.'"

9. River Phoenix was going to play interviewer Daniel Molloy, whose interest in Louis' story as they chat in modern-day San Francisco frames the ensuing flashback narrative, but the 23-year-old actor died of an accidental drug overdose on Oct. 31, 1993, four weeks before they were set to start filming.

10. So, Christian Slater  joined the production at the 11th hour.

"We'd met before and I respected him, and his work tremendously," he said of Phoenix in a 2008 interview with  Venice Magazine . "That was so tragic, and it was really awkward to be stepping into that kind of scenario. But I think I eased my own discomfort by not accepting money for it and donating my salary to his charities. It was great to work with Neil Jordan, and Brad Pitt was great, and that was the second time we'd worked together, of course, after True Romance ."

Pitt recalled to Entertainment Weekly , "We lost River. Literally a week before he's supposed to come in, he passed away. It was a horrible moment. Christian Slater came in and gallantly filled in for him. But that whole thing was dark."

11. Apparently it wasn't just Louis who was endlessly ruing the day.

Told he looked miserable throughout Interview With the Vampire , Pitt told Entertainment Weekly  in 2011 , "I am miserable. Six months in the f--king dark. Contact lenses, makeup, I'm playing the bitch role…"

During a stretch of shooting in London, "One day, it broke me… I called David Geffen, who was a producer… I said, 'David, I can't do this anymore. I can't do it. How much will it take to get me out?' And he goes, very calmly, 'Forty million dollars.

12. Pitt said that while Cruise was studiously preparing, he was the one who didn't know exactly what he was getting into.

"There was no script," the Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood star  recalled to  EW . "I knew the book, and in the book you have this guy asking, 'Who am I?' which was probably applicable to me at that time. In the book it is a guy going on this search of discovery. And, in the meantime, he has this Lestat character that he's entranced by and abhors. But then I got the script two weeks before we started shooting."

Pitt continued, "In the movie, they took the sensational aspects of Lestat and made that the pulse of the film, and those things are very enjoyable and very good, but for me, there was just nothing to do—you just sit and watch Tom Cruise. He had all this pressure to make it work, and he made it work—and good on him."

13. On a brighter note, Pitt did begin his enduring love affair with New Orleans while the film was on location there.

"I just rode my bike around all night," he told EW . "I made some great friends there." He also invested in green architecture to help rebuild after Hurricane Katrina and he and Angelina Jolie  owned a home in the French Quarter until 2016, when they sold it in the wake of Jolie filing for divorce.

14. Oak Alley Plantation, a historic antebellum site in Vacherie, La., that served as the outside of Louis' home, is reputed to really be haunted  by the benevolent ghost of its former owner, Josephine Stewart, or of her daughter Louise, who lost a leg after a wound became gangrenous. She was cut by the iron hoop under her own skirt while trying to avoid a kiss from a drunken suitor.

15. Of course the fangs were fake, but both Tom and Brad grew their hair long to play Lestat and Louis.

16. Dunst has famously said that the part where Claudia (stuck in the body of a 10-year-old forever, despite years having gone by) revives Louis was her first-ever kiss on the lips—and it was  awful .

"It was just a peck," the actress reminded Bullet magazine in 2013. "I remember Brad would watch lots of Real World episodes .  He had this long hair. He was just a hippie-ish cool dude. Everyone at the time was like, 'You're so lucky you kissed Brad Pitt,' but I thought it was disgusting. I didn't kiss anyone else until I was 16, I think. I was a late bloomer."

17. All that real-life angst only served to imbue Louis with more pain—in a good way, according to the film's toughest critic.

"Brad Pitt immediately infused the despairing Louis with understandable feeling," Rice wrote in 1994 . "He played it passive and quiet, and for me and for lots of viewers (they call me and tell me) he got what guilt was all about, a guilt sometimes that is unattached to any one death or loss. He captured the despair of some one who has fallen from grace, lost his faith, seen what he cannot abide. Brad's eyes, his manner, his soft voice throughout the film were magical."

18. Rice was also a little iffy about Antonio Banderas  playing the 500-year-old vampire Armand, described in the book as looking like a beautiful adolescent boy of Slavic descent, but just as she came around with Tom, she later said that Banderas too was "wonderful."

19. Because Armand only factors into Louis and Claudia's journey when they move to Paris, Banderas never met Cruise during the actual filming.

20. It was the success of  Interview With the Vampire that propelled Banderas, more well-known in his native Spain at the time, into starring roles in  Desperado  and  Never Talk to Strangers .

"We used Philadelphia to get him Interview With the Vampire . Then we used Vampire to increase his asking price," his agent Emanuel Nunez told  Entertainment Weekly in 1995.

21. Rice called Dunst "magnificent and flawless as Claudia, shocking in her soft, perfectly paced shifts between adulthood and childish innocence. The role as she played it is far less sinister than the Claudia of the book, and perhaps even a little more innocent then my first draft script. But the change seemed to work wondrously to deliver the heartbreak of Claudia's dilemma to the audience. She was a woman, but she was in a child's body. The actress showed incredible intelligence and cunning, and yet a child's tragic vulnerability and heartrending capacity to be disappointed."

22. Claudia was only 5 in the novel, which Rice began writing after her 5-year-old daughter  Michelle  died of leukemia in 1972, just before her 6th birthday—a terrible ordeal that the author was convinced she saw coming. "I had a prophetic dream of my daughter dying of something wrong with her blood. A horrible, horrible dream," she shared with the  Washington Post   in 1988. "It was the most clear example of a prophetic dream I've ever heard of."

23. Cruise "has this unique thing, like he can hold the absolute center of the screen of your attention, just effortlessly," Jordan, who had never met the Top Gun  star before this movie, later praised the actor . "That's what being a star is. But when you've got a star actually who's got this energy in their talent, it is kind of mesmeric, you know."

"In a way," the director reflected, "the world of a vampire is not that different from the world of a massive Hollywood star. You're kind of kept from the harsh daylight, you live in kind of a strange seclusion... every time you emerge, a tremendous ripple runs through people. And the effects these characters had, as Ann described them in the book, was like that. Lestat would enter a room and an invisible stone had dropped into a pool."

24. That's an animatronic Lestat flopping on the the floor as blood oozes from his neck when Claudia informs him she let him drink dead blood and then cuts his throat.

25. Cruise and Oprah Winfrey  would go on to share some truly special moments later, but celebrating  Interview With the Vampire wasn't one of them.

"I believe there are forces of light and darkness in the world, and I don't want to be a contributor to the force of darkness," Winfrey explained to Cruise, when he visited her show in October 1994, why she and about 30 other people walked out of a screening of the film.

"The movie is not for everyone," the ever-gracious Cruise replied.

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Luckily Oprah wasn't the arbiter of taste in this particular instance, and  Interview With the Vampire  made $224 million worldwide, with the New York Times  calling Cruise "flabbergastingly right for this role."

It may have taken what felt like 200 years to make, especially for Pitt, but when it was done, it was done right.

Even Pitt agreed that it was the "shoot from hell" for him, but "worth every minute of it. We got a great movie out of it. You know, it's part of the job."

And since there's no such thing as a story only having one incarnation in Hollywood, a whole  Interview With the Vampire  series is in the works at AMC, starring Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson as Lestat and Louis, with  Bailey Bass as Claudia. The network has acquired the rights to all 18 Vampire Chronicle  books in hopes of creating a new love everlasting.

( Originally published Nov. 11, 2019, at 1:21 p.m. PT )

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The Advice Tom Cruise Gave Kirsten Dunst That Helped Her Land Her Iconic Interview With The Vampire Role

The 1994 movie started it all for her.

Kirsten Dunst is among a crop of actors who started starring in movies as a kid and have found enough success (and life balance) to become successful into adulthood. The 39-year-old actor, who is currently receiving Oscar buzz for her role in The Power of the Dog , recently looked back over her career and remembered the moment she auditioned for her role in Interview With The Vampire , which would become her big break, and there’s a Tom Cruise story involved. 

In an episode of The Playback with Netflix , Kirsten Dunst did a deep-dive through her over 30-year career in Hollywood and shared how Tom Cruise may have helped her nab the role of Claudia. In her words: 

I auditioned many, many times for this role. This was also a huge deal for me, this was my breakout role. And then I had another screen test after that with Tom Cruise. And I remember I was the tallest of all the young girls. He had to pick each one of us up and carry us around. Just to see how we looked against Tom, and who looked the most childlike I guess. And I remember Tom whispering to me, ‘Tuck your legs under’ so I looked as tiny as possible because I was the tallest girl.

Kirsten Dunst was apparently at a disadvantage as a rather tall 11-year-old trying out for the role (she would grow up to be an above-average 5'7'', after all). She remembers auditioning with Tom Cruise, ( who is coincidentally also 5'7'' ) for a scene where the filmmakers were testing to see how Claudia would look next to Cruise’s Lestat. Dunst continued: 

So I knew he was kind of rooting for me, and we were both from New Jersey. And I think he was like ‘let this Jersey girl have it.’

Kirsten Dunst thinks the decision had something to do with the both of them hailing from Jersey, but as evidenced all these years later, she really had the stuff to go far in the business. The actress, of course, got the role and had the opportunity to work with the likes of Brad Pitt , Antonio Banderas and Christian Slater before high school. 

Following Interview With The Vampire ’s release, which became a big commercial success in 1994, Kirsten Dunst was chosen for two more high-profile roles in Little Women and Jumanji . She’d later spend her teen years making movies like The Virgin Suicides , Drop Dead Gorgeous and Bring It On before becoming Mary Jane Watson in the first Spider-Man movies . 

In recent years, Kirsten Dunst has continued to take on some fantastic projects, such as her Emmy-nominated role in Fargo and her latest film, The Power of the Dog . The Netflix Western also stars Benedict Cumberbatch , Thomasin McKenzie and her real-life husband, Jesse Plemons . All these years later, it’s interesting to see how it all began for Dunst and to see Tom Cruise was on her side from the beginning. The Power of the Dog is now streaming on Netflix. 

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Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994)

Tom cruise: lestat.

• Photos (29)
• Quotes (43)

Photos 

Quotes 

Lestat : Don't be afraid. I'm going to give you the choice I never had.

[to Malloy] 

Lestat : I assume I need no introduction.

Lestat : Oh Louis, Louis. Still whining, Louis. Have you heard enough? I've had to listen to that for centuries.

Lestat : The trick is not to think about it. See that one there? Widow St. Clair. She had the gorgeous young fop murder her husband.

Louis : How do you know?

Lestat : Read her thoughts.

[Louis looks at him inquisitively] 

Lestat : *Read* her thoughts.

Louis : [attempts to read her thoughts]  I can't.

Lestat : The dark gift is different for each of us. But one thing is true for us all, we grow stronger as we go along. Just take my word for it. She blamed a slave for his murder. Imagine what they did to him. Evildoers are easier, and they taste better.

Lestat : Listen, Louis. There's life in these old hands still. Not quite Furioso. Moderato? Cantabile, perhaps.

Claudia : How can it be?

Lestat : Ask the alligator. His blood helped. Then on a diet of the blood of snakes, toads, and all the putrid life of the Mississippi, slowly, Lestat became something like himself again. Claudia... You've been a very, very, naughty little girl.

[last lines] 

Lestat : Don't be afraid... I'm going to give you the choice I never had.

Louis : Where are we?

Lestat : Where do you think, my idiot friend? We're in a nice, filthy cemetery. Does this make you happy? Is this fitting, proper enough?

Louis : We belong in hell.

Lestat : And what if there is no hell, or they don't want us there? Ever think of that?

Louis : But there was a hell, and no matter where we moved to, I was in it.

Lestat : Evil is a point of view. God kills indiscriminately and so shall we. For no creatures under God are as we are, none so like him as ourselves.

Lestat : No one could resist me, not even you, Louis.

Louis : I tried.

Lestat : [smiling]  And the more you tried, the more I wanted you.

Claudia : Where's mama?

Lestat : Mama... mama has gone to heaven, Chérie, like that sweet lady right there. They all go to heaven.

Louis : All but us.

Lestat : Shh. Do you want to frighten our little daughter?

Claudia : I'm not your daughter.

Lestat : Oh, yes, you are. You're mine and Louis' daughter now. You see, Louis was going to leave us, he was going to go away, but now he's not. Now, he's going to stay and make you happy.

Claudia : Louis.

Louis : You fiend.

Lestat : One happy family.

Lestat : [after Claudia kills the piano teacher]  Claudia, what have we told you?

Claudia : Never in the house.

[Claudia has just killed her seamstress] 

Lestat : Claudia! Claudia! Now who are we going to get to finish your dress? These impracticalities, cherie! Remember: never in the home!

Claudia : Which one of you did it? One of you did it! Which on of you made me the way I am?

Lestat : What you are? A vampire gone insane that pollutes its own bed?

Claudia : And if I cut my hair again?

Lestat : It will grow back again.

Claudia : But it wasn't always so. I had a mother once, and Louis, he had a wife. He was mortal the same as she and so was I.

Louis : Claudia!

Claudia : You made us what we are, didn't you?

Lestat : Stop her, Louis.

Claudia : Did you do it to me?

[slashes Lestat's face, and it heals immediately] 

Claudia : How did you do it?

Lestat : Why should I tell you? It's in my power.

Claudia : Why yours alone? Tell me how it was done.

Lestat : Be glad I made you what you are. You'd be dead now if I hadn't, just like that damned corpse. Now, get rid of it!

Claudia : You get rid of it.

Lestat : I'm going to give you the choice I never had.

Lestat : Lord, what I wouldn't give for a drop of good old-fashioned Creole blood.

Louis : Yankees are not to your taste?

Lestat : Their democratic flavor doesn't suit my palate, Louis.

Lestat : Mon dieu, what melancholy nonsense. I swear you grow more like Louis each day. Soon you'll be eating rats!

Claudia : Rats? When did you eat rats, Louis?

Louis : It was a long, long time ago. Before you were born, and I don't recommend them.

Lestat : Merciful death. How you love your precious guilt.

Lestat : Your body's dying. Pay no attention, it happens to us all.

Lestat : Claudia... Claudia. Claudia! What have you done?

Claudia : What you told me to do!

Louis : Leave a corpse here to rot?

Claudia : I wanted her. I wanted to be her!

Lestat : Perfect! Just perfect! Just burn the place! Burn everything we own! Have us sleeping in the field like cattle!

Louis : You thought you could have it all...

Lestat : Oh, shut up, Louis! Mon Dieu! Come here.

Lestat : Should we put out the light? And then put out the light. But once put out thy light, I cannot give it vital breath again. It needs must wither.

Lestat : Have you said your good-byes to the light?

[bites Louis] 

Lestat : I've drained you to the point of death. If I leave you here, you die. Or you can be young always, my friend, as we are now, but you must tell me: will you come or no?

Lestat : There's nothing in the world now that doesn't hold some sort of...

Louis : Fascination.

Lestat : Yes. I'm bored of this prattle.

Louis : But if we can live without taking human life? It's possible.

Lestat : Anything's possible. Just try it for a week. Come to New Orleans. Let me show you some real sport.

Lestat : Claudia. You've been a very, very naughty little girl.

Lestat : It's your coffin, my love. Enjoy it. Most of us never get to know what it feels like.

Louis : Why do you do this?

Lestat : I like to do it. I enjoy it. Take your aesthete's taste to purer things, kill them swiftly, if you will, but do it. For do not doubt: you are a killer, Louis.

[watching a nude prostitute] 

Lestat : Now that is pure Creole. Trust Claudia to have found her. What, don't you want her?

Claudia : I want to be her.

Lestat : For you, Louis. You can pretend it's wine.

New Orleans Whore : [fearful whispering]  It's a coffin, it's a coffin.

Lestat : What's that, my love?

New Orleans Whore : It's a coffin.

Lestat : Why, so it is. You must be dead.

New Orleans Whore : I'm not dead, am I?

Louis : No, you are not dead.

Lestat : Not yet.

Yvette : [to Louis]  Are you not hungry, sir?

Lestat : Aux contraire, mon cher, he could eat the whole colony.

[starts to laugh] 

Louis : [as Yvette starts to pick up Louis's plate, he grabs her arm and looks at the veins in her neck]  I'll finish it, Yvette. Now leave us.

Lestat : Do we forgive each other then?

Lestat : Come to New Orleans, then. The Paris Opera's in town. We can try some French cuisine.

Louis : Forgive me if I have a lingering respect for mortal life.

Lestat : Whining coward of a vampire that prowls the night killing rats and poodles; you could have finished us both.

Louis : You've condemned me to Hell.

Lestat : I don't know any Hell.

Lestat : [dancing around with the corpse of Claudia's mother]  There's still life in the old lady yet.

Lestat : [to Louis]  Feed on what you will. Rats, chickens, poodles, I'll leave you to it and watch you come around. But just remember, life without me would be even more unbearable.

[laughs] 

Lestat : Enough! Enough! Stop!

Claudia : I want some more.

Lestat : Do you still want death or is this enough?

Louis : Enough.

Lestat : Louie... I'm so glad you're here. I've dreamed... of this moment. She never should've been... one of us.

Louis : It's all past, isn't it?

Lestat : Yes. Past.

[He slowly turns around in his chair to face Louis, now a mere shadow of his former self] 

Lestat : Still beautiful, Louie. You always were the strong one.

Louis : [Lestat jumps back in fear as Louis approaches him]  Don't be frightened. I mean you no harm.

Lestat : You've come home to me then?

[Louis gently shakes his head] 

Lestat : You remember how I was? The vampire that I was?

Louis : Yes, I remember.

Lestat : [sighs]  No one could refuse me. Not even you, Louie.

Lestat : [Gently laughing]  Yes, you tried. And the more you tried...

[laughing] 

Lestat : ... the more I wanted you.

[as a helicopter hovers over with Lestat frightened] 

Lestat : Oh, I can't. Stop it, Louie! I hate such lights. And that noise! They make the night brighter than the day!

Louis : [Kneeling down in front of Lestat]  Lestat... It's false light. It can't harm you.

Lestat : [Whispered]  If you stay with me, I could venture out again... become the old Lestat.

Louis : I must leave now.

[He leaves Lestat] 

Lestat : You are a vampire who never knew what life was until it ran out in a big gush over your lips.

Lestat : I am afraid, madam, my days are sacrosanct.

Lestat : [Lestat follows a trail of bloody dead rats to a tunnel]  All I need to find you, Louis, is follow the corpses of rats.

Lestat : It's so easy you almost feel sorry for them. You'll get used to killing. Just forget about that mortal coil. You'll become accustomed to it, all too quickly.

Lestat : We are predators, whose all-seeing eyes were meant to give them detachment.

Lestat : Have you said your goodbyes to the light?

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"We waste our money so you don't have to."

"We waste our money, so you don't have to."

Movie Review

Interview with a vampire.

US Release Date: 11-11-1994

Directed by: Neil Jordan

Starring ▸ ▾

• Brad Pitt ,  as
• Louis de Pointe du Lac
• Tom Cruise ,  as
• Lestat de Lioncourt
• Kirsten Dunst ,  as
• Antonio Banderas ,  as
• Stephen Rea ,  as
• Christian Slater ,  as
• Daniel Malloy
• Domiziana Giordano ,  as
• Thandie Newton ,  as
• Roger Lloyd-Pack as
• Piano Teacher

Kirsten Dunst, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in Interview with a Vampire .

Anne Rice is the mother of the modern vampire.  Twilight , True Blood , Vampire Diaries and every other variety of 21st century bloodsucker owes an enormous debt to her.  It was she who transformed the image of vampires from Eastern European Counts with strong accents and a bat fetish, into the modern young, glamorous and angst ridden undead super-heroes that we've come to know today.  Although several attempts have been made to adapt Rice's work to the screen, so far Interview with a Vampire , directed by Neil Jordan, written by Rice herself and featuring an all-star cast, is the only  one to be successful.

The title stems from the idea that Louis (Pitt), a vampire, tells the story of his life in modern day San Francisco via an interview.  This allows Louis to narrate the story from a modern perspective and provide commentary on it as it goes along.

In 1791, Louis, distraught over the death of his wife and child, becomes suicidal, only instead of finding death, he finds undeath in the arms of the vampire Lestat (Cruise). Becoming immortal does little to improve Louis' mood as he finds it comes with the price of having to commit murder every night to stay alive.  Lestat, on the other hand, lives for the kill and loves everything there is to love about being a vampire.

At the time of its release, the casting of Cruise as Lestat was the biggest news about the movie.  Rice famously disapproved and then changed her mind (whether sincerely or simply to help sell movie tickets is anybody's guess) about the casting choice and legions of the book's fans were in an uproar over it.  He actually does a decent job in the part.  There's really only one thing wrong with this movie version of Lestat and that's the god awful wig Cruise is forced to wear.  I know that they wanted to make him blonde as he is in the books, but that was really the best they could come up with?

In an effort to keep Louis happy, Lestat creates a vampire child for him.  Claudia (a young Kirsten Dunst), is exactly what Louis needs to draw himself out of himself.  He and Lestat become her "parents".  While young, Claudia and Lestat become close as they hunt together, but as Claudia ages, but her body remains that of a child, she begins to resent him.  Her relationship with Louis matures and they become something like lovers, which leads them down a path that separates them from Lestat and sends them to Europe where they hope to discover something of the truth about vampires.

While Pitt and Cruise are both serviceable in their parts, it is Dunst who truly delivers the best performance in the film.  She has a maturity in the part that truly belies her young age and you have no problem believing that she really is a grown woman in the body of a child.  She is the most sympathetic character.  Louis mopes too much and Lestat is fun, but he only has himself to blame for what happens to him.  Claudia, while a killer, is the true victim of the three.  "Yet you could do it to me. Snatch me from my mother's hand, like two monsters in a fairy tale. And now you weep!" she tells Louis.

Much of the credit for this movie must go to director Neil Jordan.  It is beautiful to look at and dripping with atmosphere.  Rice's script, while filled with some great lines, is also highly dramatic and the mood of the film goes hand in hand with it.  Surely he must have had a hand in pulling such a grown-up performance out of Dunst as well. 

It's far too late to reassemble the cast from this movie for a sequel now, but if they could bring Neil Jordan back on board as director, I would be the first in line to see it.  With vampires at such a peak of popularity right now, I can't believe no one has thought of reviving the books as either another movie or even a television series.

There is nothing gay about this.

Before the Twilight books, Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire  was the vampire book series of choice.  She was the dark queen of Goth fans.  It lacks the romance of Twilight , but her vampires could wipe the floor with anyone in Twilight.

Scott complimented Jordan's direction, and he does maintain a dark dreary tone consistently, but he   romanticizes the time period.  The hot as hell Negro servant, concerned for her master's eating habits is laughable.  The "in the know" slaves who practice voodoo.  It all takes place in a very fictionalized world but is presented as truth.  

The direction and story work but not the two main characters.  Lestat is insane and ultimately heartless.  He created Louis as a companion, and for some reason stuck with him even though Louis provides him with nothing but grief.  Louis despises Lestat but is ultimately a wimp.  He never stops Lestat from killing, he just piss-n-moans about it.  Neither is a likable character.

Only Claudia makes any sense.  You understand her motives and issues.  She is smarter than them both.   She outwits Lestat and does much of the thinking for Louis.  The corpse in her bed is a disgustingly revealing moment. 

Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, as Louis and Lestat, gaze deeply into each other's eyes in Interview with a Vampire .

Interview with a Vampire is an epic tale that covers several centuries and crosses several continents. Yes Anne Rice created the modern vampire. At the time of this movie’s release I was one of the fans complaining about the casting of Tom Cruise as Lestat. I have now changed my mind. He is actually quite good in the part. I also had a problem with how they aged Armand as played by Antonio Banderas. In the books he has the appearance of a youth of about sixteen.

For all the uproar over Tom Cruise’s casting, it is actually Brad Pitt as Louis, a vampire with a conscious, that carries the movie. He does a decent job, down to the voice-over narration. “Her blood coursed through my veins sweeter than life itself. And as it did, Lestat's words made sense to me. I knew peace only when I killed and when I heard her heart in that terrible rhythm, I knew again what peace could be.”

I disagree with my brothers on one point each. Scott, I don’t think the movie ever implies a lover-like relationship between Louis and Claudia. It is much more parent/child. And I disagree with Eric about the lack of romance. It is there between Lestat and Louis and then later between Armand and Louis.

It seems Brad Pitt is just as desirable and sexy playing the undead as he is as a human. Every male vampire he meets seems to have romantic feelings for him. Notice all the caressing of hair and faces going on and the lover’s quarrels between Louis and Lestat, as well as the tender lover’s dialogue between them. Here’s a typical shared exchange: Lestat, “No one could resist me, not even you, Louis.” Louis, “I tried.” Lestat (with a seductive smile), “And the more you tried, the more I wanted you.”

An eleven year old Kirsten Dunst is brilliant as the child vampire Claudia. I like the way she says, “I want some more.” after her first taste of blood. In her innocence the line is much more chilling. As a child that gets older but never grows up she is the most tragic character in this gothic story. Christian Slater (whatever happened to his career?) replaced River Phoenix as the interviewer after Phoenix’s untimely death. The movie was dedicated to his memory.

Often I watch a movie that I haven’t seen in many years and it fails to live up to my memory. Interview with a Vampire is that rare exception. I enjoyed it more now than in 1994. It is a beautifully shot and memorably acted vampire epic.  

Photos © Copyright Warner Bros. (1994)

© 2000 - 2017 Three Movie Buffs. All Rights Reserved.

Kirsten Dunst Still Gets the Famous Tom Cruise Cake 30 Years After 'Interview With the Vampire' (Exclusive)

Tom cruise still gifts kirsten dunst famous cake, 30 years after ‘interview with the vampire’, jojo siwa dropped $50k on new teeth, 'y&r's eric braeden giving health update after cancer treatment (exclusive), missy elliott and ciara react to ‘1, 2 step’ turning 20 ahead of new tour (exclusive), carnie wilson opens up about weight-loss journey and new cooking show (exclusive), morgan wallen appears calm while handcuffed for rooftop incident, alec baldwin accused of being ‘inattentive’ during firearms training prior to ‘rust’ set shooting, sylvester stallone accused of verbal harassment on ‘tulsa king’ set, beyoncé's daughter rumi breaks big sis blue ivy's record with new music milestone, zendaya opens up about having kids and how tom holland handles fame, ‘90 day fiancé’: jamal and luisa reveal they hooked up a ‘couple times’, jonathan scott asks james corden to officiate his wedding to zooey deschanel (exclusive), rihanna on motherhood: son's first word and how many kids she wants to have, drew scott explains why he's keeping baby no. 2’s sex a surprise (exclusive), 'the beach boys' documentary trailer no. 1, inside jessica simpson's family vacation to mexico for spring break, 'american idol' winner chayce beckham reacts to katy perry leaving show (exclusive), brittney spencer calls keeping 'cowboy carter' secret 'overstimulating' (exclusive), 'the voice': reba mcentire fights back tears over toni braxton cover in first knockouts round, former 'bachelorette' charity lawson reveals she underwent breast enhancement surgery, dunst co-starred alongside cruise in 1994's 'interview with the vampire.'.

Just like a vampire's lifespan, Tom Cruise 's famous holiday coconut cake is eternal! Kirsten Dunst sat down with ET's Kevin Frazier to reflect on the 30th anniversary of her hit film,  Interview With a Vampire , where the subject of her co-star, Cruise, came up. 

"Still getting that cake," Dunst, 41, revealed to ET. 

She added of her husband and frequent co-star  Jesse Plemons , "Jesse gets the cakes so we double up on our cakes."

Plemons and Cruise co-starred in 2017's American Made . 

Cruise's holiday cake gift is the dessert of legends with the A-lister reportedly sending the cake to a long list of fellow celebrities each year. 

As for Dunst's thoughts on the classic 1994 vampire film, which also co-starred Brad Pitt and Antonio Banderas , she has nothing but positive associations with the film. 

"When I think back I have fond memories. It was a production like nothing I have experienced to this day. The costumes and the sets. It changed the course of my life," she shared. 

These days, Dunst is tackling another kind of horror film with her dystopian flick, Civil War . In the movie, Dunst plays Lee, a photojournalist documenting a civil war happening within modern-day America. Plemons appears opposite his wife and the mother of his two children, playing an extremist militia member. 

"He wouldn't have played a part like this if I wasn't in the film," Dunst shared. "He did a favor for us because that is a really disturbing role to play."

The couple has teamed up on several projects together, including their turn on Fargo , the show where they met.  

Civil War  is in theaters April 12. 

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This Week in Genre History: Interview with the Vampire makes for boring conversation

Credit: Warner Bros.

Welcome to This Week in Genre History,  where Tim Grierson and Will Leitch, the hosts of the Grierson & Leitch podcast , take turns looking back at the world’s greatest, craziest, most infamous genre movies on the week that they were first released.

Every generation gets its iconic vampire tale. It’s been more than a decade now since the first Twilight film hit theaters, turning Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart into superstars and inspiring the mad devotion of legions of fans. But before Twilight , there was another bloodsucking phenomenon that made the leap from the page to the screen, becoming a box-office smash and breaking records as the biggest R-rated opening weekend of all time (at that point). But not before it seemed like it was going to be a total disaster.

On Nov. 11, 1994, Interview with the Vampire opened across America, introducing moviegoers to Anne Rice’s novel about Lestat ( Tom Cruise ), a vampire who befriends Louis ( Brad Pitt ), an 18th-century New Orleans gentleman mourning the death of his wife and child. Turning Louis into a vampire, they spend the next several decades together luxuriating in their ennui, eventually adding a young girl ( Kirsten Dunst ) to their moody brood. With hints of homoeroticism that had to be carefully shielded because of the era in which it was released, Interview with the Vampire faced all sorts of problems during its making — not least of which being that Rice absolutely hated the idea of Cruise playing her beloved Lestat. (“You don’t usually start a movie with someone not wanting you to do it,” Cruise said at the time . “That’s unusual.”)

Lots of masterpieces have to deal with behind-the-scenes drama. (In some ways, all that uncertainty makes the film’s eventual acclaim all the more satisfying for those involved.) But Interview with the Vampire is that rare case of a highly anticipated movie beset with problems that ends up making a ton of money but is, nonetheless, pretty awful. The film might have turned out better today, when both Hollywood and its audience seem a little more willing to embrace queer love stories. But that’s hardly the only deficiency of this overdramatic, very silly movie.

Why was it a big deal at the time? A movie starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt? In 2020, that would be a major event, but in the early '90s... well, it still was fairly huge, but both stars were in a very different place in their careers than they are now. Cruise was a massive star thanks to Top Gun and The Firm , and also gaining respect as an actor because of acclaimed dramas such as Rain Man and Born on the Fourth of July . So it didn’t seem that odd that he’d choose to play the brooding, beautiful Lestat. (A somber role in a potential blockbuster would merge his commercial and artistic sides.) But fans of Rice’s popular 1976 novel (the first of several to feature Lestat) went into an uproar, convinced he lacked the gravitas and depth — and the height — to play such a commanding, charismatic presence. You know how comic book fans get enraged when a new Batman or Joker is announced, complaining that the new actor is all wrong for the part? That same vitriol was pointed at Cruise for Interview with the Vampire — encouraged by, of all people, Rice herself.

“The Tom Cruise casting is so bizarre, it’s almost impossible to imagine how it’s going to work,” Rice said early on , later adding, “I have one question: Does Tom Cruise have any idea of what he’s getting into? I’m not sure he does. I’m not sure he’s read any of the books other than the first one, and his comments on TV that he wanted to do something scary and he loved ‘creature features’ as a kid, well, that didn’t make me feel any better. I do think Tom Cruise is a fine actor. [But] you have to know what you can do and what you can’t do.”

As for Pitt, he was a far less well-known entity. After his breakthrough in Thelma & Louise , he’d starred in the bomb Cool World , gotten good reviews for A River Runs Through It , explored his dark side with Kalifornia, and played a memorable stoner in True Romance . So landing the part of Louis was a huge step up, except Pitt didn’t know what he was getting himself into. “There was no script,” he complained in 2011 . “I knew the book, and in the book, you have this guy asking, ‘Who am I?’ Which was probably applicable to me at that time. ‘Am I good? Am I of the angels? Am I bad? Am I of the devil?’ In the book, it is a guy going on this search of discovery... But then I got the script two weeks before we started shooting.” 

To his chagrin, Pitt realized that Louis had been de-emphasized so that Lestat was more of the main character. “No discredit to Tom, man,” Pitt said in that same interview. “He had pressure on him. There were all the fanboys of the book. He had all this pressure to make it work.”

Meanwhile, Neil Jordan was red-hot due to his Oscar win for Best Original Screenplay for The Crying Game . The Irish director had previously made a horror movie with 1984’s The Company of Wolves , but this was his first big studio gig. “[I] thought [Anne Rice’s script] was really interesting and slightly theatrical,” he said in 2014 . “Then I read the novel, which is extraordinary... It’s not very often you can make a complicated, dark, dangerous movie and get a big budget for it. Vampire movies were traditionally made at the lower end of the scale, on a shoestring, on rudimentary sets. [ Vampire producer] David Geffen is very powerful and he poured money into Interview . I wanted to make it on an epic scale of something like Gone With the Wind .”

The circumstances all seemed perfect for a hit: big star (backed by a rising star), hip director, culturally prominent book. Plus, vampires were in vogue after 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula , an Oscar-winning commercial success. Even the initial backlash to the casting of Cruise had been addressed: About a month before the film’s release, Warner Bros. put on a P.R. blitz insisting that Rice had seen the film and “loved” him in the role. ( According to Geffen , “She even phoned [Cruise] up and told him she was wrong. It’s a great thing when someone who had been critical of a movie saw it, loved it and admitted she was wrong... a very classy thing to do.”) Maybe they’d caught lightning in a bottle?

What was the impact? Interview with the Vampire debuted at the top spot its opening weekend, beating out the other new release, The Santa Clause . The film was the 11th-highest-grossing movie of 1994 in the U.S., just behind Pulp Fiction . It received two Oscar nominations — for Score and Art Direction — but critics were generally unimpressed by Cruise. Back when Rice had initially been unhappy about his casting, she had said , “I wanted a great actor of appropriate voice and height who could carry the part — [John] Malkovich, Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeremy Irons. It’s a different league... When you’re talking Lestat, you’re talking Captain Ahab, Custer, Peter the Great. It’s that kind of class act.” Reviewers tended to agree, with the Dallas Observer ’s Matt Zoller Seitz writing , “because the role is emotionally static and one-note, it can’t hold our attention unless it's played by an actor with deep reserves of mystery, elegance, and sexual power. Cruise has no such qualities.”

But the creative failure of Interview with the Vampire was hardly Cruise’s fault alone. Pitt was utterly wasted as Louis, who is reduced to drifting through the narrative as Lestat calls all the shots. Dunst, whose character becomes the spirited daughter in this bizarre pseudo-family, at least brought a little life to the proceedings, but the film simply seemed too campy and navel-gazing to truly connect. (This is the film’s central conflict: Lestat wants Louis to behave more like a vampire and prey on humans, and Louis doesn’t want to, so instead he does nothing.) As gorgeously shot as the movie was, if Jordan’s point was to show the downside of being a vampire, he succeeded all too well: These characters were a complete drag to be around.

What is interesting about Interview with the Vampire is its muted, but still evident, gay subtext. The intimacy of Lestat’s initial attack on Louis has an undeniable sexual edge to it, and several of the film’s male vampires have an almost flirtatious rapport with one another. But this was long before LGBTQ+ love stories were remotely common in studio movies — Brokeback Mountain was still more than a decade away — and so that angle wasn’t explicitly explored. 

Last year, Jordan was asked if anyone ever told him to pull back on the homoeroticism. “I mean the movie is true to the book, I think,” he replied . “Anne Rice wrote the script. I didn’t change anything. If anything, I made it more penetrating and troubling in that regard... [Cruise and Pitt] played it more like master-slave, or dominance is more the fore of their relationship than sexuality. That is true. But I wasn’t told to take anything out of it. I wasn’t told to pull back on the homoerotic elements at all.”

One suspects that if Interview with the Vampire were made today, the sexuality would have been more prominent — resulting in a much more emotionally charged film. (By taking its sensuality more seriously, it would have been sexier as a result.) Instead, what we were left with was an awkward attempt at the sort of brooding Gothic romantic horror that’s meant to send shivers down your spine. In reality, though, the film mostly just made you giggle. 

Maybe the upcoming AMC series based on Rice's work will see a different result.

Has it held up? If anything, Interview with the Vampire feels even tamer and more inert than when the film was first released. As cheesy as Twilight was, it and the many vampire-related, Netflix-adjacent programs that have come out recently now feel like the way modern audiences think of bloodsuckers — as opposed to this tortuously self-important drama. 

Rice wrote subsequent novels about Lestat, but they failed to translate into a film franchise. (Does anyone remember the 2002 movie The Queen of the Damned ?) Watching Interview with the Vampire now, it’s not a surprise that there weren’t sequels, despite the fact that it was a hit. There’s really nowhere else to go with this world — it feels dead on arrival. 

It’s also shocking to see two very good actors each give one of their worst performances. One suspects that, now later in their careers, they would have found something more electrifying to do with these parts. It’s not exactly the same type of roles, but Cruise’s outlandish turns in Magnolia and Rock of Ages at least show him flashing the flamboyance that he lacked with Lestat. And Pitt has only grown into a more compelling onscreen presence since saying goodbye to Louis.

Of course, Pitt was excited to put Louis in the rearview mirror even back then. In that 2011 interview, he talked about how miserable he was during the shoot, recalling trying to talk Geffen into letting him out of his contract. “I said, ‘David, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t do it. What will it cost me to get out?’ And he goes, very calmly, ‘$40 million.’ And I go, ‘OK, thank you.’ It actually took the anxiety off of me. I was like, ‘I’ve got to man up and ride this through, and that’s what I’m going to do.’”

The experience of sitting through Interview with the Vampire is no less excruciating. 

Tim Grierson is the co-host of  The Grierson & Leitch Podcast , where he and Will Leitch review films old and new. Follow them on Twitter or visit their site .

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Interview with the vampire season 2 trailer: louis confronts what really happened with claudia.

The Interview with the Vampire season 2 trailer teases Louis and Claudia's time in Paris and hints at Louis remembering what really happened there.

• Interview with the Vampire season 2 delves into Louis and Claudia's time in Paris.
• The trailer teases Louis' memories in Paris and hints at Claudia's unexpected betrayal.
• The season 2 trailer also includes new actor Delainey Hayles as Claudia and Armand's increased significance.

The Interview with the Vampire season 2 trailer shows Louis confronting what really happened with Claudia. Based on Anne Rice's 1976 novel of the same name, which was previously adapted into the 1994 film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, the AMC series follows Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) as he recounts his life, including his tumultuous relationship with his former lover Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), to the journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian). The cast also includes Delainey Hayles taking over the role of Claudia from Bailey Bass for season 2.

Today, AMC+ shared the official trailer for Interview with the Vampire season 2 . Watch it below:

The official season 2 trailer teases Louis and Claudia's time in Paris and hints at Louis remembering what really happened there.

8 Interview With The Vampire Book Moments We Can't Wait To See In Season 2

Everything we know about interview with the vampire season 2.

As the third Interview with the Vampire season 2 trailer , this is just the latest footage to hint at what happened to Louis and Claudia following their surprising betrayal of Lestat during the season 1 ending . The trailers have also unsurprisingly brought back the show's signature interview format, but more interestingly, Armand's increased significance in season 2's story has also been spotlighted. As the third one, this should be the final trailer for Interview with the Vampire season 2 before it premieres on May 12.

Other than Anderson as Louis and Reid as Lestat, the returning cast and characters for season 2 also include Bogosian as Daniel Molloy, who may not be around once the show finishes adapting the first book in The Vampire Chronicles . Assad Zama also returns as Armand, who will become a crucial character despite his small role in season 1. Ben Daniels is back as Santiago, though the tragic vampire character Claudia, originally played by Bass, will be played by Hayles in season 2 .

Season 1 adapted the first half of Interview with the Vampire and ended on a significant cliffhanger as Claudia convinces Louis to help her murder Lestat. However, Louis ultimately spares Lestat by confining him to a coffin, secured from the inside, in a rat-infested area to allow him to recuperate over time. The first season also saw Louis misleading Daniel on multiple occasions, casting doubt on his reliability as a narrator and revealing that Rashid is actually Armand, creating plenty of new possibilities as Interview with the Vampire season 2 adapts the second half of Anne Rice's novel.

Interview with the Vampire season 1 is streaming on AMC+.

Source: AMC+

Interview with the Vampire

*Availability in US

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Based on Anne Rice's novel series that began in 1976, Interview with the Vampire is a gothic horror fantasy series that explores the life of Louis de Pointe du Lac through an interview with a journalist. Told through flashbacks of Louis' life during the interview, the series examines Louis' relationship with the vampire that turned him, Lestat de Lioncourt, and a teenage girl named Claudia, whom he turns. The series is the first of Anne Rice's Immortal Universe media franchise.

Tom Cruise Still Sends Kirsten Dunst Famous Cake, 30 Years After Interview With the Vampire

Posted: April 9, 2024 | Last updated: April 9, 2024

Kirsten Dunst revealed to ET that her former ‘Interview with the Vampire’ co-star, Tom Cruise, still gifts her his famous cakes. ‘Civil War’ hits theaters April 12.

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New trailer and poster for amc's interview with the vampire season 2.

AMC has released a new trailer for Interview With the Vampire Season 2. This next chapter of the story will continue Anne Rice’s iconic supernatural vampire horror story. The season will see Louis and Claudia embarking on a dark and violent journey to Paris where they meet a group of theater vampires who have a connection to Lestat.

While I’m a fan of Anne Rice’s novels and the original film adaptation, the first season of this series was hard to get through. I don’t think I’ll be coming back for round two.

In the year 2022, “The vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac recounts his life story to journalist Daniel Molloy. Picking up from the bloody events in New Orleans in 1940 when Louis and teen fledgling Claudia conspired to kill the Vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, Louis tells of his adventures in Europe, a quest to discover Old World Vampires and the Theatre Des Vampires in Paris, with Claudia.”

“It is in Paris that Louis first meets the Vampire Armand. Their courtship and love affair will prove to have devastating consequences both in the past and in the future, and Molloy will probe to get to the truths buried within the memories.”

Interview With the Vampire  is written and executive produced by Emmy nominee Rolin Jones , who also serves as the showrunner. Season 2 stars Jacob Anderson as Louis de Pointe du Lac, Sam Reid as Lestat de Lioncourt, Delainey Hayles as Claudia, Ben Daniels as Santiago, Eric Bogosian as Daniel Molloy, Assad Zaman as Armand, and more.

The series returns on May 12 on AMC and AMC+. Are you looking forward to Season 2?

Kirsten Dunst Confronts ‘Civil War’ Hysteria, Hollywood Pay Gaps and the Media Dividing America: ‘Everything Is Broken’

Before I watched “ Civil War ,” two publicists working on the dystopian thriller assured me that it isn’t a political film.

In the movie, Kirsten Dunst plays a dogged photojournalist muscling her way through a smoldering Washington D.C., trying to document the bitter conflict between two heavily armed factions tearing America apart. I didn’t buy that it didn’t have something to say about this moment. And neither does Dunst.

We’re having lunch in Toluca Lake, where Dunst is sipping a bottle of apple juice she’s been carrying in her purse (“Moms always need to keep it on hand,” she whispers conspiratorially) and gearing up for what may be her most controversial movie since, at 11, she upstaged Tom Cruise and kissed Brad Pitt in “Interview With the Vampire.” “Civil War” is going to be debated, all right — on cable news, in op-eds and across social media. When the film premiered at SXSW in March, audience members were groaning and cheering at its bloody, shocking finale.

The buzzy film represents a high-stakes gamble for A24. The company will unleash “Civil War” in 3,000 theaters on April 12, marking A24’s widest release ever, and with a $55 million budget, it’s the most expensive feature yet for the indie studio behind “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Hereditary.” It’s a risk, too, for Dunst, who hasn’t been in a movie since her Oscar-nominated turn in Jane Campion’s 2021 drama “The Power of the Dog.” Now 41, Dunst is that rare child star of the ’90s with career longevity and not too much heavy baggage. (Her peers in this include Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman.)

But it’s impossible to watch “Civil War” without being reminded of this year’s presidential election — you know, the one where democracy and maybe the fate of the free world hangs in the balance? As we sit in a crowded café about a mile from the home Dunst shares with husband Jesse Plemons and their children, she sometimes struggles to accept that she and and director Alex Garland are lobbing a cinematic stick of dynamite. For instance, Dunst won’t admit that the film’s president, played by Nick Offerman as a narcissist with an authoritarian streak, resembles the 45th, and perhaps 47th, Oval Office occupant.

“It feels fictitious to me,” she says of any connection between Offerman’s character and Donald Trump. “I don’t want to compare because that’s the antithesis of the film. It’s just a fascist president. But I didn’t think about Nick’s character being any certain political figure. I just thought this is this president, in this world, who will not abide by the Constitution and democracy.”

Still, “Civil War” contains plenty of parallels to the characters that dominate our national drama. Take the defiant president who disbands the FBI and refuses to leave the White House, or the gun-toting soldiers of fortune who wear crosses (shades of the Proud Boys, perhaps?).

Garland didn’t fill in the blanks for the cast. “I have my own answers to these questions. And if someone asked me, I’d answer it,” says the director, who conceived the film as Trump left office. “But if Kirsten didn’t ask me, I wouldn’t answer.”

For her part, Dunst isn’t shy about answering questions about real-world politics. On the looming election: “I’m gonna vote for Biden. That’s my only option. Right?” (Though she laments that Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke, a home-state politician for her Dallas-born husband, didn’t go the distance in the 2020 presidential primary.) Or take her stance on Jonathan Glazer’s polarizing Oscar speech, which Dunst watched from the Dolby Theatre audience. In an open letter, more than 1,000 Jewish creatives slammed “The Zone of Interest” director’s remarks, which faulted Israel’s government for its conduct in Gaza. But Dunst was more receptive. “My interpretation was he was saying that genocide is bad,” she says. On religion, a subject many in Hollywood try to avoid, she doesn’t hide that she’s a practicing Christian: “I did have both my children baptized because I love the tradition. I believe in God.”

While Dunst insists “Civil War” is entirely fictional, the great divide in America that it dramatizes is all too real. “Media really stokes it big time,” she says. “The media is forcing us to choose a side. Everything’s a lot more complicated than that.”

As for “Civil War,” it’s possible — even likely — that the movie will be seen as another example of liberal Hollywood banging on about how fringe conservatives are torching America. The world premiere was met with a rapturous standing ovation. But that was in Austin, a blue dot in the sea of red that is Texas. Regardless of the reception, the film offered Dunst another chance to act opposite Plemons, who has a small role in “Civil War,” after they worked together in “The Power of the Dog” and the second season of FX’s “Fargo,” where they met in 2015.

“I’m very picky,” Dunst says as she stabs a poached egg with her fork. “But that also means I have long breaks where I don’t work. Like, I can’t do a project for the money. It’s just very hard for me to be like, ‘Yes!’ If it’s not in my heart, I can’t do it because I’ve been doing this for so long.”

Thirty-six years, to be exact. In 1988, at the age of 6, Dunst shot her first movie, Woody Allen’s “Oedipus Wrecks,” one-third of the anthology “New York Stories.” The middle segment, “Life Without Zoë,” was directed by Francis Ford Coppola and written with his daughter, Sofia Coppola, who became Dunst’s frequent collaborator years later.

“I remember they wanted to send a car down to New Jersey to pick me up to play with Dylan [Farrow],” Dunst recalls, referencing Allen’s daughter, who later accused him of sexual abuse. “My mom was like, ‘I’m not sending my daughter in a town car to go on some play date without me.’”

Although some of Dunst’s early roles placed her in adult-sounding situations, her mother and “an acting teacher who was like my father” made sure she was insulated. She played a child prostitute in 1996 on “ER,” but to this day, she doesn’t realize that her character was presented to audiences as such. “I thought I was like a street kid. I didn’t know I was a prostitute. Really?” When asked about being 11 and getting to kiss Pitt in “Interview With the Vampire,” Dunst spins the question. “How about Brad Pitt got to kiss me?” she says with a laugh.

But Dunst’s mom couldn’t safeguard her entirely from Hollywood’s darker side. She shares an unsettling encounter that took place when she was 16. “I did one meeting once with a director, and he asked me an inappropriate question. And that was the only time. I was like, ‘That’s not cool.’ But I didn’t say that [to him]. I was freaked out. I didn’t know if I should answer or not.” (She declines to name the director.)

That close call reminds Dunst of the thin line separating her from the child stars depicted in the recent Max docuseries “Quiet on Set,” which examines the abuse suffered by young Nickelodeon actors in the ’90s and early aughts. Dunst brings up the show. “It sounds real bad,” she says. “A lot of grooming and weird stuff going on.” She already was familiar with the hardships faced by actress Jennette McCurdy, who is featured in “Quiet on the Set.” “I read [her] book ‘I’m Glad My Mom Died.’ Good book.”

“We didn’t know my mom would follow us in the car,” she says. “We were into the Psychic Eye, a store on Ventura Boulevard, and doing angel cards and lighting candles. We’d write like, ‘An angel is watching over you’ on little pieces of paper and then put a penny in it, throw it off the balcony of the apartment building we were staying at and watch for people to pick them up.”

It was the mild rebellion of kids acting out just a little (Dunst attended a traditional Catholic high school in Sherman Oaks). But there were reminders that she wasn’t an average teenager.

“I was walking to like the convenience store and talking to some kids, and they’re like, ‘Well, my agent says I’m the next Kirsten Dunst.’ I just thought, ‘Y’all crazy. I have a Jersey mother. Very East Coast.’ I never thought, ‘I’m famous.’ Like, I went to normal schools.”

But most of her classmates didn’t enjoy the perks that came with Dunst’s extracurricular activities. “There’d be a gorgeous Christmas tree fully decorated in my dressing room from Tom. He treated me like a princess,” she says of Cruise. As a wrap gift for “Jumanji,” Williams bought a 13-year-old Dunst her first computer. “It was an Apple, the ones that came in all those different colors. He was like the most generous, kind, funny person.” While shooting “Little Women” in the dead of summer, Dunst and Sarandon’s daughter, Eva Amurri, ran a lemonade stand that attracted co-stars Winona Ryder and Christian Bale as customers.

The alternate history of Dunst’s career is nearly as intriguing as the string of films that elevated her to the A-list. She was approached for a role in “American Beauty” where her naked body would be covered in red roses (a part eventually played by Mena Suvari). Dunst wasn’t interested in playing the teenager lusted after by her middle-aged neighbor (Kevin Spacey). “I don’t know if I necessarily turned it down,” she says. “I think I just turned down the meeting or something. But yeah, I just didn’t feel comfortable with the sexuality.”

Dunst instead took on a lead role in Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides,” an offbeat, sexually charged coming-of-age story. “I was very nervous,” Dunst says. “Because there’s a sequence where I’m making out with all these boys on a roof of the house. [Sofia] was like, ‘Don’t worry. You don’t have to make out with any of them. Just cover your hair and nestle into their neck. We’ll make it all work.’”

For Dunst, the most stressful part of the scene was having to jump on Josh Hartnett. “His wig fell off one take,” she remembers. “I was just like, ‘I’ve never done anything like that — you know what I mean? — in real life. Josh was very sweet, but it still was … you know?” She trails off, growing shy as she thinks about shooting a love scene from more than 25 years ago.

“The Virgin Suicides,” released in 2000, established Dunst as an art-house leading lady and critical favorite. Later that year, she proved that she could carry a studio film with the cheerleader comedy “Bring It On,” a hit that spawned six sequels — none of them involving Dunst. “I didn’t even think about it then, but these days, I would have been a producer on ‘Bring It On,’” she says ruefully. “But I wasn’t.” She has no desire to revisit the franchise. “People keep saying we should do another ‘Bring It On.’ I’m like, ‘No. What would we do?’”

No amount of success, though, could have prepared Dunst for “Spider-Man” and her role as Mary Jane in the first (and arguably best) of the many iterations of the web-spinning franchise. Dunst was filming the teen romance “Crazy/Beautiful” when she had her first meeting with director Sam Raimi. “It was so innocent, the reasons I wanted to be in that film,” she says, sounding nostalgic. “The story lived within Sam in such a deep way that I needed to be a part of that feeling, I guess.”

Dunst did her screen test with her eventual co-star Tobey Maguire in a hotel banquet hall in Berlin. (She was shooting Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Cat’s Meow” in the city.) “Tobey and I immediately had a connection,” she recalls.

When the film became a massive blockbuster, grossing $825 million globally and kicking off the modern era of superhero films, a sequel became a fait accompli. That’s where things get messy. Maguire pulled down a reported $17 million to reprise his role. “It might have been more, actually,” Dunst speculates. As for her salary, “It was different. A lot different. And I was in ‘Bring It On’ and had a track record.” It was another example of how, in Hollywood, young women didn’t receive pay parity.

Despite Dunst’s frustration over the salary gap, money wasn’t — and isn’t — a big motivator for her. When she’s prioritized big paydays, it’s been a mistake. “When I was younger, in my 20s, I didn’t have the best guidance, I would say, and I did a couple of duds for money reasons, but nothing that I would have actually done otherwise,” she says. “I get offered the most money on things I don’t want to do. As soon as I took the reins and started to develop my tastes and who I wanted to work with, everything shifted.”

That meant collaborating with unconventional auteurs, from Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) to Lars von Trier (“Melancholia”), along with a pair of Coppola reunions (“Marie Antoinette” and “The Beguiled”). As she moved from one challenging project to the next, she kept growing as an actress. Coppola remembers being struck by the depth Dunst displayed as the sexually repressed schoolteacher in “The Beguiled.”

When Garland was looking for his “Civil War” heroine in 2021, Dunst raised her hand, months ahead of her first Oscar nomination for “The Power of the Dog.” As she tore through the script, she wasn’t just reading it to see how meaty her part would be. She wanted to know how the story unfolded. “I was fully immersed. I just remember feeling like I had never read anything like this before,” she says. “I haven’t done anything like this. And I know it was between me and another actress.” As for the other actress, Dunst won’t divulge her name — but says they are very different.

Then again, is there anyone else quite like Dunst? Garland had been watching her movies for years and was familiar with what she could do — to the extent that he never asked her to audition to play Lee, a stoic war photographer carrying the grief of capturing mass death and suffering in the streets. “I know people are skeptical about actors. Like ‘That’s an easy job. You roll out of your trailer, and you kind of make-believe in front of a lens for a bit and then go back,’” Garland says. “It’s harder than that. And one of the things Kirsten had to be was tough and vulnerable on camera, and I think also in herself, and I think that she just did it very brilliantly.”

Plemons came along for the ride, appearing opposite Dunst in one pivotal scene in which he plays a frightening xenophobe in fatigues (it’s never clear which team he’s on). “Civil War” was shot in Atlanta, with the final act unfolding in and around the replica White House at Tyler Perry’s studio — the same place Madea once held a satirical press conference to announce she was Trump’s new communications director. “We fell in love working together, and we will always have that check and balance with each other,” she says of Plemons. “And honestly, he did us a favor, because Alex had another actor for Jesse’s role and that actor couldn’t do it. So I feel like we lucked out.”

Co-star Wagner Moura was struck by the ease with which the couple navigated their tense scene together. “They gave each other lots of space, and they didn’t invade each other’s moment as actors,” Moura recalls. “Kirsten is just very cool, and I don’t say that about many people.”

When they’re not working, Dunst and Plemons are focused on raising their two sons, ages 5 and 2. Theirs is an analog lifestyle. “We’ve got record players,” Dunst says. “We’re just not a ‘Siri, play whatever’ household. Our kids don’t have iPads either. If they want to use an iPad on the plane, it’s Dad’s iPad. And we’re not phone-at-restaurant kind of people.” She glances down at her own device for the first time in two hours. “I’m not raising a kid that can’t have conversations at the table.” As for the two subsequent “Spider-Man” trilogies, she never bothered to check them out — or any Marvel movies for that matter. “It’s just not my thing. But I did see ‘Paw Patrol,’” she says with a classic, deflating, Coppola-heroine eye roll.

The Dunst-Plemons clan doesn’t hang out with a lot of Hollywood types outside of Plemons’ fellow Texas pal Glen Powell. Her closest friend in the business is Gloria Sanchez Productions co-founder Jessica Elbaum, whom she met while filming 2012’s “Bachelorette.” The pair are developing a dark comedy together; Dunst plans to meet with writers after our lunch. She’s juggling some other potential projects. Margot Robbie is developing a movie for Dunst via her LuckyChap production company. It’s easy to see in Robbie a sort of heir to Dunst — ebullient but wickedly clever, slyly in on the joke. Robbie, who has produced “Barbie” and “I, Tonya,” has had opportunities that Dunst, eight years her senior, is only now seizing. Dunst credits Robbie as a trailblazer, who has “done so much for all of us” by becoming a power broker as well as a star. “I’m wildly impressed,” she says.

“It feels like I have to be on guard,” Dunst says. “The fact that people are losing their agents because they have a political standpoint — it feels scary.” She pauses for what feels like a full minute, exploiting the tension, turning it into a crafty dodge. “Now I’m, like, so tired of talking,” she says before looking back at me and hitting the table. “Your turn!”

Set Design: Peter Gueracague; Styling: Samantha McMillen/The Wall Group; Makeup: Nina Park/Kalpana; Hair: Bryce Scarlett/The Wall Group; Manicure: Emi Kudo/A Frame Agency; Look 1 (lead image): Dress: Jil Sander; Earrings: Sophie Bille Brahe; Look 2 (cover): Dress: Jil Sander; Earrings: Anita Ko; Look 3 (green dress): Dress and shoes: Bottega Veneta; Earrings: Grace Lee; Ring: Starling; Look 4 (blue background with red shoes): Dress and shoes: Prada; Earrings and Ring: Irene Neuwirth;

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