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Brad Pitt was certainly no stranger to Hollywood prior to 1994, but that year arguably propelled him to movie star status thanks to him starring in The Favor, Legend of the Fall and Interview with the Vampire. That latter movie in particular has remained a fan-favorite all these years later, with Pitt starring opposite Tom Cruise in this adaptation of Anne Rice’s same-named novel. However, Pitt admitted last year that he was “miserable” when he filmed Interview with the Vampire, and now director Neil Jordan has shared his take on why the actor “suffered” during this time.
A little over a year ago, Pitt described his experience working on Interview with the Vampire as “six months in the fucking dark” where he played “the bitch role,” i.e. the Louis to Cruise’s Lestat. This stemmed from Pitt’s expectations for the role differed from what was in the script that he got just two weeks prior to principal photography beginning. When Jordan was asked by Variety if he was aware of Pitt’s unhappiness at the time, the filmmaker responded:
Brad was great in the role. I think the problem that he suffered from was the fact that the role suffers. It was the passive role, and it was the central role … often the narrative central character can be the most passive element in the whole equation. We were shooting at night constantly, we never saw the daylight for months and months, and I think it affected him, but it was part of the character as well. I mean, Louis is somebody who is punished through a 300-year period by this creature. So the way the role affected Brad was not unlike the journey Louis himself had to go through.
So in addition to confirming that the night shoots on Interview with the Vampire, one of the best vampire movies, were rough, Neil Jordan also theorized that what was required of Brad Pitt to properly bring Louis de Pointe du Lac to life. After all, the character is turned into a vampire by Letstat sooner after losing his wife and unborn daughter in 1791, and after regretting this decision over his unwillingness to harm innocent, he suffered further heartbreak when Kirsten Dunst’s Claudia, whom he treated as his daughter, was burned to ash. It’s no wonder Pitt felt down during the course of production, although when interviewer Todd Gilchrist asked Jordan if he tried to “create an atmosphere on set that would alleviate the heaviness” of what the actor might have been going through, the director said:
No, I don’t think I did. I just tried to work with him as an actor. But for one thing, Brad was there for far longer than Tom Cruise was, so he had to endure the entire production, so maybe that — and the passivity of the role, perhaps — took a toll on him a little bit. But I thought he was really good in the part. Any faults of what people perceive to be the performance are faults of the actual character itself, and of the novel itself. I mean, Louis suffers in the novel from the moment he’s turned into a vampire to the very end of the book. So I’m sure it was a tough journey for Brad, but it was also a tough journey for the character, too.
Brad Pitt may have had a bad experience making Interview with the Vampire and was disappointed that it ended up being more of a “Tom Cruise vehicle,” as he once described it, but the final product proved to be a critical and commercial success. The following year, Pitt starred in Seven and 12 Monkeys, and at that point he was firmly cemented as one of Hollywood’s most high-profile actors. Interview with the Vampire is now 30 years old, and while Pitt might not be eager to give it a watch, you won’t find any shortage of people who still like viewing it these days.
Although the Interview with the Vampire movie isn’t available for streaming at the time of this writing, the Interview with the Vampire TV series airs on AMC, with the entirety of the show being streamable on AMC+ and the first season being accessible with a Netflix subscription. That program will return for its third season at a yet-to-be-announced date.