Blood Sucking Hotties: Interview with the Vampire 30th Anniversary
Warner Bros. (1994).
In ’94, a lot of people wouldn’t have minded if the stars of Interview With The Vampire came to suck their blood.
We tend to have an odd fascination with vampires. It’s possible that the idea of vampires might stem from some ancient group of people that drank blood as a ritual in the hopes for immortality, but I would have to do a deep deep dive to figure that out, and I don’t have the time. There have been books, movies, plays, songs, and all kinds of different art that depicts these blood sucking beings.
In 1994, Interview with a Vampire was made from the novel written by Anne Rice into a film, and starred some of the sexiest men at that time as the leads: Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. It also was the feature film debut of Kirsten Dunst who was only 11 years old at the time of filming.
Cruise, as the egotistical Lestat, must lead his burdensome counterparts (Pitt and Dunst) through different eras while longing for the old days when he didn’t feel tied down by their whining. As his foil, Pitt, who plays a more sensitive vampire named Louis, detests the idea of having to murder people in order to survive. He wishes he had never met Lestat, who is the one that turned him into a vampire. And then there’s Dunst, who played Claudia, a child vampire that was bitten by Louis during a desperate moment of weakness, but was completely turned by Lestat.
Cruise and Pitt were both hot commodities in ’94, and having the two in a film together meant box office gold. Not only that, but they were both in their physical prime. Most depictions of vampires in recent times like to imagine them as the pale skinned hotties of the undead, which also adds an element of oh la la to the film. Sexy factors aside, Cruise and Pitt were able to pull off their respective roles pretty well.
The movie was plagued with rumors of Pitt and Cruise famously not getting along on set. Maybe Cruise wasn’t able to turn Pitt into a Scientologist; that damn Lestat made it look so easy to turn someone. My guess is jealousy because Pitt had just come into his wonderboy stage and was a somewhat fresh face, whereas Cruise had been around for at least a good decade beforehand and was probably feeling a little overlooked. The rumors of a feud only added to the tension between the two men on screen as they dueled over morality and immortality.
Lestat is an old school vampire. For him, sucking the life out of someone is an artform and a pleasure. He enjoys the thrill of seduction that leads to taking his victims’ lives. I think Cruise is an excellent actor, and he was intriguing in this role. Up until that point, he had never really played a true antagonist, and he was able to pull it off. Not only that, but he brought a certain snobbery to the role.
Pitt, for his part, had already shown that he had range in some of his previous roles. His sensitive portrayal of Louis, who had a hard time swallowing the idea of needing human blood in order to be strong, and also becoming a doting father figure to Claudia, seemed like a good next step for him in the early 90s; it only added to his portfolio.
As with all movies that are hitting milestone birthdays, the question of whether it has aged appropriately, like its leading men, needs to be pondered. My response: Eh, maybe. It’s kind of a period piece since it mostly takes place between the late 1700s to mid 1800s, so that makes it timeless, but some of the visuals have obviously aged out. The tale, though, still holds up because it deals in the realm of fantasy and gothic horror. Not only that, but as long as people are preoccupied with vampires, the movie will continue to feed that obsession.