The Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt ‘Interview With the Vampire’ feud rumors, explained

Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images

The second Tom Cruise stepped out on the red carpet at the European premiere of F1: The Movie to greet the film’s star, Brad Pitt, the world of celebrity gossip revved its engine and then collectively lost its mind. The myriad body language experts of X fired off their instant analyses of the interaction. It was awkward! Look at the handshake! These men clearly hate each other! Gossip sites, like Closer, passed along the accounts of anonymous insiders, who bandied about theories like Cruise being “very territorial about the U.K.”

OK, but then who gets Topeka?

All of that aside, there is actual reporting(!) with sourced quotes(!!) from the people involved(!!!) at the base of this feud conversation.

Where’s the beef?

The original source of the bad blood dates back — appropriately — to the one time that Pitt and Cruise actually shared the screen, the 1994 adaptation of Anne Rice‘s Interview With the Vampire directed by Neil Jordan.

In an interview with Premiere (which tragically doesn’t have a proper online archive), Pitt told the magazine that he and Cruise were very different people, in a way that eventually began to “bug” him.

“You gotta understand, Tom and I are… we walk in different directions,” Pitt told Premiere. “He’s North Pole. I’m South. He’s coming at you with a handshake, where I may bump into you, I may not, you know?  … I always thought there was this underlying competition that got in the way of any real conversation. It wasn’t nasty by any means, not at all. But it was just there and it bugged me a bit.”

Fighting words!

But wait until you get a load of what Pitt says in the very next sentence, the one most gossip publications don’t publish alongside the previous. “But I’ll tell you, he catches a lot of sh-t because he’s on top, but he’s a good actor and he advances in the film,” Pitt said. “He did it. I mean, you have to respect that.”
Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in Interview With the Vampire (Photo: Warner Bros)
Huh! Less scintillating!

The story behind the story

To be fair, Pitt cops to having a bad time making Interview With the Vampire elsewhere, some of it connected to his position in the movie relative to Cruise’s. He described the shoot as “miserable” to Entertainment Weekly in 2011, saying it was “six months in the f–king dark,” “playing the bitch role,” which had caught him by surprise because he wasn’t able to read the script until two weeks before filming started.

“No discredit to Tom, man,” Pitt said. “He had pressure on him. There were all the fanboys of the book. He had all this pressure to make it work, and he made it work — and good on him.”

Speaking to Gold Derby recently, Interview costar Christian Slater said that he sympathized with Pitt on the grueling shoot.

“The majority of my work was with Brad. And I think I was catching him at the end of a long shoot [laughs]. It was a good, long six-month shoot. And I feel like he was at the end of his rope at that point. I think he was sick and tired of getting his face painted with those little veins and wearing fangs. But you know what? He was a professional. He was great. Certainly in the role. He did it. … He still showed up, 100 percent. But I just thought it was funny that he was so sick of it by that point. He was just over it.”

The aftermath

Years later, Cruise and Pitt found themselves orbiting the same project — but not to star together. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Cruise was considered for the role of Cliff Booth in Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a role that went to Pitt and earned him his Oscar.

Rumors then swirled that Cruise could join Tarantino’s since-aborted The Movie Critic with Pitt, but that talk was apparently unfounded.

The reunion

So what’s really going on?

Cruise’s presence at the premiere makes complete sense due to his past work with F1‘s director Joseph Kosinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Cruise’s apparent blood oath to do everything he can to single-handedly save the theatrical experience. Did that mission simply bring him into the orbit of a former coworker with whom he didn’t gel terribly well for a photo op? Maybe! But where’s the fun in that?
Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise at the F1 premiere (Photo: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for Warner Bros. Pictures)