The Tom Cruise character Daniel Day-Lewis “didn’t want to play”
In Hollywood, it’s an invariable occurrence that movie roles are offered around the most significant actors of the time until they are eventually taken on by a given star. In the 1990s, both Tom Cruise and Daniel Day-Lewis emerged as huge acting talents and there was an instance in which Cruise profited from Day-Lewis’ role rejection.
Day-Lewis had come to the public’s attention in the 1980s with a series of brilliant performances in the likes of A Room with a View, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and My Left Foot, while Cruise also experience widespread success during the decade, starring in Top Gun, The Color of Money and Rain Man.
Both actors were also to enjoy an incredible 1990s, and in the first half of the decade, Day-Lewis was offered a role in Neil Jordan’s gothic horror film Interview with the Vampire, based on Anne Rice’s 1976 novel of the same name. The film tells of an 18th-century plantation owner, Louis, who is turned into a vampire by an immortal by the name of Lestat.
In his memoir, Neil Jordan explained the reason he felt Day-Lewis turned the role of Lestat down. “Brad Pitt had agreed to play Louis and somehow assumed Daniel Day-Lewis would be playing Lestat, an assumption shared by Anne,” the director wrote. “I offered it to Daniel, who read it and, as I expected, didn’t want to play the character.”
Jordan went on to suggest that because Day-Lewis had been “confined to a wheelchair” when he played the artist Christy Brown in My Left Foot, the role of Lestat might have been too restrictive. “He would have had to sleep in a coffin for the entirety of this production if he followed the same practice,” Jordan noted. “So we moved on.”
With Day-Lewis out of the picture, Jordan moved on to Cruise, who had been experiencing a career-high at the same time as Day-Lewis. In fact, not only had Cruise established himself as a talented actor with his efforts in the 1980s, but Jordan actually thought that he shared a number of crossover traits with the character he would play in Interview with the Vampire.
“He had to live a life removed from the gaze of others,” Jordan wrote. “He had made a contract with the hidden forces, whatever they turned out to be. He had to hide in the shadows, even in the Hollywood sunlight. He would be eternally young. He was a star. He could well be Lestat.” Indeed, Cruise had, in a way, signed a deal with the devil of Hollywood, granting eternal fame at the sacrifice of his personal privacy.
Anne Rice had originally considered Alain Delon for the role of Louis, while she had been keen on Julian Sands playing Lestat. In fact, when Cruise was signed up to play Lestat, Rice had been critical of the decision and doubted that it would ever work. At the final hour, she suggested a number of other actors for the role and even tried to make Pitt and Cruise swap characters.
By the time the film was completed, though, Rice admitted that she was wrong about Cruise and that the actor did manage to make the character work despite her criticism. Of course, it’s not known what Rice might have made of a Daniel Day-Lewis performance, but thankfully, Cruise was on hand to deliver a commendable effort.
