Tom Cruise's Unmade 'Interview With the Vampire' Sequel Still Exists [Exclusive]

Vampires have a habit of sticking around forever, but Interview with the Vampire never managed to do the same thing on the big screen. Neil Jordan's 1994 adaptation of Anne Rice's novel was a major success and left the door wide open for Tom Cruise to return as Lestat, right down to its final moments. Instead, Cruise moved on, and Jordan's version of the story ended there. Speaking exclusively with Collider while discussing the new 4K restoration of Interview with the Vampire for Collider Rewind, Jordan revealed that this wasn't for a lack of trying.

During our conversation, the filmmaker revealed that he actually wrote a screenplay adapting Rice's second Vampire Chronicles novel, The Vampire Lestat, which would have shifted the focus from Louis to Cruise's character. There was just one fairly significant problem: Cruise didn't want to play Lestat again. Jordan told Collider:

“I wrote a sequel. They asked me to do a version of The Vampire Lestat, the second book that Anne had written, where Lestat is central. It’s Lestat’s story. Interview was Louis’ story, and I wrote that sequel. It’s mainly set in 18th-century France. I mean, Anne had this rather ridiculous idea of him being like David Lee Roth or something, playing the guitar and all that shit. That was fine. But the 18th-century story of how he became a vampire was absolutely fascinating, I found, and I did write it. But Tom, at the time, he’d never done sequels to anything, so he didn’t want to reprise the character.”

Will Tom Cruise Ever Make 'The Vampire Lestat'?

Nowadays, Cruise has done a whole host of sequels. Mission: Impossible arrived two years after Interview with the Vampire and became the defining franchise of his career, while he's also reprised his roles in Jack Reacher, Top Gun, and soon, Days of Thunder. But don't hold your breath on this one. "If he wants to do it, it's still there. I don't imagine he would do it. I don't imagine Brad would want to revisit the part either. At the gap of 30 years, I'm not sure I would," said Jordan. "I don't even know where that script is. I can't even access it on my computer because it's in a version of Final Draft that no longer exists. So maybe somebody can read it at Warner Brothers, but I haven't read it for a long time. I had fun writing it, though. I did."

Somewhere in the Warner Bros. archives, then, there may still be an alternate future for Cruise's Lestat waiting to be rediscovered. Interview with the Vampire is available on 4K UHD. Stay tuned for more from Collider Rewind.