Tom Cruise, despite the youthful energy that allows him to still run across buildings and jump off cliffs into his 60s, has always made for a unique heartthrob. Hollywood has never lacked handsome leading men, but Cruise always knew how to resonate with audiences by showing a softer, sensitive side of his persona. He was buffeted by a domesticity that rendered his characters’ sexual desires endearing rather than threatening.

Football star Stef (All the Right Moves) and the straightlaced Joel (Risky Business) are young men fueled by their hormones, but Cruise connects with the audience by showing their insecurities and fears rather than making them one-dimensional archetypes from ’80s sex comedies. Action movies like Top Gun and Days of Thunder may make Cruise’s characters seem cocky to his rivals like Iceman (Val Kilmer) and Rowdy (Michael Rooker), respectively, but it’s the complete devotion the actor brings to the table that becomes mirrored in these roles. Maverick and Cole won’t stop until they’re the best, but even here, Cruise doesn’t seek to overwhelm the love interests in these movies. His bravado awaits a strong woman who will challenge his devil-may-care attitude.

While the star has occasionally played dangerous men like sweaty and bitter pick-up guru Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia or hardened assassin Vincent in Collateral, never has a sense of sexual allure, danger and glee fit together so nicely as they do in the character of Lestat in Interview with the Vampire. He is the representation of pure hedonism that provides a Faustian bargain to the grieving Louis (Brad Pitt) at the start of Neil Jordan’s picture and energizes the film with a spark that no other actor, despite their looks—Pitt and co-stars Antonio Banderas and Christian Slater are no slouches—can match. In a world defined by bottomless appetites, no one drinks as deeply as Cruise’s Lestat.

This conflict between the morose Louis and the irreverent Lestat would seem to be an odd pairing if not for the simmering homoerotic undertones in their relationship. Lestat, and later in the film, Banderas’s Armand, crave a bond with Louis. Even setting aside the sexual visuals of the vampiric process (an aesthetic that Jordan fully embraces), the tension between the two men is also what binds them. The heat between the characters is undeniable and unmistakable. “Brad Pitt (Louis) and Tom Cruise (Lestat) are gorgeous not to mention the sexual tension that exists between these two characters every time they are together,” says Tini. Khaleesi26 adds, “[I don’t know] why it’s not talked about [more]. I mean guys, c’mon young Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise [in] the same movie as vampires how much better than that could it ever get?”

It fits that Cruise’s best performances are the ones that subvert his dominant mode of action hero, especially since that approach has been the driving force of his movies since taking on the juicy ing part of Stacee Jaxx in 2012’s musical comedy Rock of Ages. Looking across Cruise’s illustrious filmography, he’s the action guy who runs (literally and figuratively) towards his goal, but he thrives as a performer when he gets knocked off his path like the agent who accidentally grows a conscience in Jerry Maguire or a husband questioning his sexual prowess and his wife’s fidelity in Eyes Wide Shut.

While Letterboxd delight in Cruise’s Lestat performance, when it comes to these subversive roles, they acknowledge the surprising gravitas he brings to his collection of broken men. “I love Tom Cruise and I’m glad to finally see a film tear down his persona right from the beginning,” Garrett says of Jerry Maguire. We know Cruise in movies largely because he plays the hero rather than the heavy, and yet it’s roles like Lestat that don’t fit neatly into that box where he has the room to elevate an entire picture—like when he plays the vulgar film exec Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder. Adam echoes my reaction the first time I saw the movie when they write, “Wait, that was TOM CRUISE?!”

That sexual energy vibrating off Interview with the Vampire also makes it a distinctive picture, not only for Cruise, who has rarely had the chance to play such an overtly sexual being, but because the film is unafraid to take a comical turn. Louis and Lestat playing ‘my two dads’ to their vampire daughter Claudia (a young Kirsten Dunst holding her own against Hollywood heavyweights) is played for light comedy (sure, they all kill people, but no family is perfect), but it also reveals how Lestat can’t help but bristle at the domesticity Louis longs for. This concoction of sex and comedy wrapped in a vampire story makes Interview with the Vampire seem too bizarre to work, and yet it was one of the biggest movies of 1994 and still clicks with audiences today.

The adage “they don’t make ’em like this anymore” is used often, but they likely don’t even know how to make movies like this one these days. That isn’t because of a sudden bout of prudishness, but because the market relies heavily on broad, action-based blockbusters. In 1994, Interview with the Vampire was the tenth highest-grossing film of the year. Jump forward to 2024 where you have the star power of Zendaya anchoring the overtly sexual Challengers, and despite massive acclaim it can only sit at #33 (as of writing) on the box office chart for the year. In Cruise’s career, the action movies helped platform the daring, outside-the-box work. He could play a murderer in Collateral, secure in the knowledge that the following year he had another sci-fi blockbuster from Steven Spielberg. Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut are less risky if you know you’ve got Mission: Impossible II in the works.

Now with a market that can only do blockbusters, there’s less room for Cruise to make a film like Interview with the Vampire and have it be a hit. The actor is set to team with two-time Oscar-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu for an untitled project in which he allegedly plays “the most powerful man in the world, who embarks on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s savior before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything.” The collaboration is an exciting one for Cruise fans, as it marks his first non-Mission or Top Gun picture since 2017’s American Made.

In the meantime, Interview fans are sinking their teeth into a new adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel with AMC’s series starring Jacob Anderson as Louis and Sam Reid as Lestat. Renewed this year for a third season, and with increased fandom from its rolling out on Netflix, the series has gained a fervent following (and sparked a noticeable upward trend of Letterboxd watching Neil Jordan’s film), but it has to jockey against countless other TV series trying to hook people’s attention in an oversaturated streaming landscape. The show can be as sexy as it wants, but now it’s one of many sexy TV series, and certainly not a statement piece by one of Hollywood’s biggest actors playing against type.

Interview’s unabashed sexiness and homoeroticism finds new fans and devoted lovers each year, and the film still has a sizable impact on later vampire stories—whether it’s the tortured longing of Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) in the Twilight series or the comically lusty escapades of the suburbanite vamps in What We Do in the Shadows. Although we also saw vampires move more towards an action mold with the Blade trilogy and the Underworld franchise, it’s easy to see Claudia’s influence on the longing and sadness of the child vampire in Tomas Alfredson’s incredible 2008 feature Let the Right One In. Rather than simply being a genre curiosity of the ’90s or a blockbuster that time forgot, Interview with the Vampire has left its mark on the vampire genre while also being a distinct entry in Cruise’s filmography.

Even if Tom Cruise cannot return to the world of Interview with the Vampire, the sexuality and verve he brought to the film echoes through the following decades. It never feels correct to refer to Lestat as an antagonist. While the character may be more voracious than Cruise’s heroes, the actor doesn’t lose sight of the character’s emotional depth—be that Lestat’s frustration with Louis’ melancholy, his pain at being abandoned and left for dead by his vampire family, or the gallows humor of dancing with a corpse. The interview may be with Pitt’s Louis, but the voice we hear belongs to Cruise’s Lestat.