The success of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in Hollywood is astounding, no one can deny that. However, the biggest stars in the world do not get along. It is no secret that both A-listers have sustained their decades-long rivalry and the reason is quite simpler than one can imagine.
Reportedly, both the stars are quite competitive and from there, they have built the wall between them. Of course, Pitt and Cruise have seen their best career, Cruise being the biggest star in the 80s while Pitt dominated the 90s. Still, they have a fair share of stardom, but their rivalry is far from diminishing.
Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise’s Rivalry
Ridley Scott’s 1991 adventure drama Thelma & Louise provided the breakthrough role Brad Pitt really wanted in an era dominated by Tom Cruise‘s stardom. However, Pitt claimed a leading role in the 1994 Neil Jordan horror romance Interview with the Vampire alongside Cruise. But behind the scenes, the actors did not walk along as pals rather they avoided mere greetings and basic friendly gestures. “He bugged me,” Pitt confessed after starring in the $223 million movie (via YourTango).
“There came a point during filming when I started really resenting him. He’s North Pole, I’m South. He’s always coming at you with a handshake, whereas I may bump into you. There was this underlying competition that got in the way of any real conversation,” he said of Cruise.
The rivalry between the stars continued. Starting from Interview with the Vampire the cold war between the megastars is believed to be still intact as they have not appeared in any other movies or publicly seen together. In 2013, it was in the buzz that the duo was set to collaborate in Go Like Hell, but the film never happened.
Brad Pitt Nearly Walked Off Interview with the Vampire
Pitt’s experience working in Interview with the Vampire was, as he himself expressed, “miserable.” Adapted from Anne Rice’s widely acknowledged novel of the same name, the author was forging her name in the credits of the movie as a screenwriter for the first time. The screenplay, however, was not up to the mark for Pitt. The Fury actor played Louis de Pointe du Lac, a Louisiana vampire in the film and Pitt saw a striking difference in his character in the book and movie versions.
“In the book, you have this guy asking, “Who am I?” Which was probably applicable to me at that time: “Am I good? Am I of the angels? Am I bad? Am I of the devil?” In the book, it is a guy going on this search of discovery. And in the meantime, he has this Lestat character that he’s entranced by and abhors… In the movie, they took the sensational aspects of Lestat and made that the pulse of the film, and those things are very enjoyable and very good, but for me, there was just nothing to do – you just sit and watch,” Pitt explained (via Ranker).
Pitt was extremely unhappy with the script and decided to walk off the project as he called the producer David Geffen to ask his way out. “I am miserable. Six months in the f*cking dark. Contact lenses, makeup, I’m playing the b*tch role…” Pitt recalled. “One day, it broke me… I called David Geffen, who was a producer… I said, ‘David, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t do it. How much will it take to get me out?’ And he goes, very calmly, ‘Forty million dollars,'” Pitt continued. And “I go, ‘Okay, thank you.’ It actually took the anxiety off of me. I was like, ‘I’ve got to man up and ride this through, and that’s what I’m going to do,'” he added.
Certainly, Forty million dollars would be a whiplash on Pitt as he was just an up-and-coming actor at the time.
