Tom Cruise Says He and 'Very Good Driver' Brad Pitt Would Race Go-Karts During Breaks from “Interview with the Vampire”

It wasn't all existential gloom on the set of 1994’s Interview with the Vampire, according to Tom Cruise.

The actor, who starred as wickedly charismatic blood-sucker Lestat opposite Brad Pitt’s brooding Louis in the moody film based on Anne Rice’s 1979 novel, shared a fond memory of his former costar during Paramount Pictures’ Thursday, April 3, presentation at CinemaCon 2025 in Las Vegas.

According to CinemaBlend, while discussing his upcoming film Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Cruise noted director Christopher McQuarrie’s work on the script for Pitt’s 2013 film World War Z.

“Brad’s got a new movie, [F1], with Jerry Bruckheimer, Joe Kosinski,” Cruise, 62, said. “I can’t wait to see that this summer. It’ll be awesome.”

The Kosinski-directed, Bruckheimer-produced sports drama, in which Pitt stars as a former Formula 1 driver, is set for a June 27 release.

“It’s great to see Brad driving,” Cruise added. “He’s very good. He’s a very good driver. Believe me, I’ve raced against him. When we were doing Interview with the Vampire we’d go and race go-karts. We’d literally finish and go drive go-karts all night.”

Related: Kirsten Dunst Remembers Tom Cruise Decorating Her Dressing Room for Christmas on the Interview with the Vampire Set

The lighthearted anecdote seems to contradict what Pitt has said about filming Interview with the Vampire. In 2011, he told Entertainment Weekly that he was “miserable” while making the film, describing the experience as “Six months in the f------ dark.”

He also took issue with the way his character was translated from novel to screen compared to Cruise’s.

Related: Kirsten Dunst Says Brad Pitt 'Was Like an Older Brother to Me' on Interview with the Vampire Set

“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,” he explained. “And no discredit to Tom, man. 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.

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Similarly, Interview with the Vampire director Neil Jordan told Variety last year that he thought Pitt, 61, “suffered” on set for the same reason his character suffered in the film.

“We were shooting at night constantly, we never saw the daylight for months and months, and I think it affected him, but it was part of the character as well,” Jordan reflected. “Louis is somebody who is punished through a 300-year period by [Lestat]. So the way the role affected Brad was not unlike the journey Louis himself had to go through.”

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