Sinful Sunday: Enjoying the Undead Life with Tom Cruise's Lestat in "Interview with the Vampire"
Anne Rice's most beloved vampiric creation embodies eros and thanatos in the 1994 adaptation starring Tom Cruise (and Brad Pitt).
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Welcome to “Sinful Sundays,” where I explore and analyze some of the most notorious queer villains of film and TV (and sometimes literature, depending on my mood). These are the characters that entrance and entertain and revolt us, sometimes all three at the same time. As these queer villains show, very often it’s sweetly good to be bitterly bad.
When I think back on the queer villains who have had a significant impact on my development as a gay man, Anne Rice’s Lestat is right there at the top of the list. When I first read the late Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, I actually started with The Vampire Armand, then went to The Vampire Lestat, and it was only after I’d finished the two of those that I finally made it to Interview with the Vampire. As a result, I was primed to see Louis as the lame and self-indulgent whiner, while Lestat was the deliciously decadent and hubristic antihero. Small wonder, I thought, that he became the main character of the following books.
Only once I’d read the books did I turn my attention to the 1994 film adaptation and, while I was much more of a book purist at the time, I still thought that the movie did a fine job of bringing Rice’s words and characters to the screen. It was lush and queer and sexually-charged; in other words, it was everything I wanted from an adaptation of Interview.
At first, however, I wasn’t sure whether I really bought Tom Cruise as my beloved Lestat. I mean, this was Tom Cruise, after all, the kind of man who is in many ways the epitome of 1980s and 1990s movie stardom. How would it be possible, I wondered, for him to completely disappear into a role as larger-than-life as Lestat? As I watched the film, however, I slowly came to appreciate the brilliance of Cruise’s performance. The very things that marked him as a movie star of a particular kind were exactly those things that have always made Lestat one of Rice’s most popular creations (even if, as I suspected, Cruise never disappears into the role. He’s always Tom-Cruise-as-Lestat).
Cruise’s Lestat is an undeniable force of nature. From the very moment that he sets eyes on Louis, it’s clear that he is not going to rest until he has this human being firmly under his dominion. For his part, Louis makes it clear how much he desires Lestat’s domination, for all that he insists that it is not so. It’s not long before Lestat and Louis are setting up their own little queer enclave in 18th and 19th century New Orleans. Whatever Louis might want the young interviewer Daniel to think (and can we get some praise for a teasingly twinky Christian Slater?), the truth is that Louis is a willing participant in Lestat’s games.
And who can blame him? There’s a mad little twinkle to Lestat’s eyes that would seduce even the most puritanical prudish of young gentleman. He strides through the world as if he owns the place, and who can blame him? As book readers know, even at this point Lestat is a tremendously powerful vampire, and he has all the wealth he could ever desire. He feels that he has every right to do what he wants, whatever others might think and, let’s be real, that kind of confidence is sexy as hell.
However, as charismatic and appealing as he is, there’s also no denying that Cruise’s Lestat is a bit of an egomaniacal monster. This is the kind of vampire, after all, who thinks nothing of torturing a pair of prostitutes, just because he can. What’s more, he enjoys it. Unlike Brad Pitt’s Louis, who is tormented by the fact that he must feast on blood in order to survive, Lestat has long ago accepted the fact that he is an apex predator, the one thing that all humans should fear.. Every time he preys on a mortal, you can see the way his eyes gleam, a reminder that there will always be something about him that is beyond the mortal ability to comprehend. He is dark desire and lust and death all bundled up into one in a terrifying marriage of eros and thanatos.
And, of course, there’s also the barely latent homoeroticism. From the viewpoint of 2024 the attraction between Louis and Lestat can seem a bit tame–particularly in light of the much more explicit television series produced by AMC–but it’s still remarkable just how homosexy the whole thing is. Certainly, this version does go out of its way to heterosexualize Louis, giving him a wife and child who die off-screen early in the film (in the novel it’s his brother’s death that drives him to despair), but this feels like a little protesting-to-much. The on-screen erotic chemistry between Cruise/Letsat and Pitt/Louis is so intense that you’re left with no other conclusion than that they are lovers, whatever the film’s story might have to say about it.
Once Lestat turns Claudia, however, things begin to change. Oh, there is a brief period of time when the three of them make their own little queer family, with Kirsten Dunst’s Claudia providing a bit of glue holding this little trio together. Claudia is in some ways Lestat’s queer-child reflection, and she has even less restraint than he does. Unfortunately for Lestat, she turns these venomous powers against her own maker, setting them all on a path that leads to death and destruction. As so often in horror, queerness is a powerful force that often exceeds the boundaries that others try to set on it.
In the years since, my appreciation for Cruise’s performance as Lestat has only grown. While I now think that Sam Reid gives the definitive interpretation in the AMC series, there will always be a part of me that looks back fondly on Cruise. Indeed, I can’t help but wonder what might have happened had we gotten a version of Queen of the Damned in which Cruise continued to portray Lestat in the 20th century, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks it would have been divine to see Cruise don Lestat’s rock star persona that ends up being the catalyst for the whole Akasha storyline. Stuart Townsend was, I think, one of the better things about the abomination that is the 2002 film, but that’s not saying a lot.
Lestat, like all the best queer cinematic villains, teases us with the possibility that, sometimes, one can really be evil and get away with it to live in the end. Even though the entire film has been framed by Louis narration–which, among other things, frames Lestat as an object of desire–the film’s ending gives Lestat the chance to seize the narrative for himself. As Daniel drives away from his interview, Lestat ends up feasting on him, offering him the chance to take up the Dark Gift, even as he also laughingly responds to Louis’ taped interview. He literally gets the last word, and I can't think of anything more purely Lestat than that.