The actor Brad Pitt “started really resenting”
Not many actors get the chance to become superstars, but there’s a reason why Brad Pitt has regularly been described as a character actor trapped in a movie star’s body. He’s been an A-lister for decades, but it’s never been the reason why he got into the industry.
Of course, it definitely helped during the early stages of his career being one of the most handsome men in Hollywood, but Pitt was always driven by a desire to better himself as a performer. On the other side of the coin, names like Tom Cruise actively enjoy being larger-than-life figures who carefully cultivate a public persona, which helps explain why things were so frosty between the two.
Despite working together on Neil Jordan’s 1994 romantic Gothic fantasy Interview with the Vampire, the tabloids ran rampant with tales of Pitt and Cruise being at odds on set and behind the scenes. To this day, the fact they’ve never again circled each other’s orbit lends credence to the whispers of a rivalry between two of Tinseltown’s longest-tenured icons.
Pitt even alluded to their vastly different lifestyles and approaches to fame in an interview with Rolling Stone around the time of the film’s release, admitting “the machine Tom runs is very impressive”, but not before adding “I wouldn’t want to live like that, but still”.
Reflecting further on the differences between being an acclaimed thespian and having the ability to open a movie based on name alone, Pitt drew Sean Penn into the conversation: “In my opinion, Sean Penn is the best we have in that age group,” he said. “So you can’t sit and make Tom out to be the bad guy. Tom Cruise is good in this film.”
That didn’t stop the differences between Pitt’s Louis and Cruise’s Lestat from bleeding out of the screen and into real life, though, with the former revealing that “at a point I started really resenting him”. He got over it eventually, partly once he realised “it was completely because of who our characters were” and a problem of his own creation.
It’s easy to praise somebody’s performance on-screen while harbouring an active dislike for them when the cameras aren’t rolling, but Pitt did at least make the point of saying “I honestly like the guy”. Whether that’s true or not, they haven’t exactly gone out of their way to deny they were never going to be the best of friends either during or after production on Interview with the Vampire.
Ironically, Pitt’s thoughts on Cruise and the differences between them remain largely applicable almost 30 years later, with the two-time Academy Award winner continuing to choose unexpected and challenging projects while the other carries out his duties as cinema’s most prominent daredevil and action hero.