executive: We did Interview With the Vampire, and at that point I became aware that we also had control of The Vampire Lestat. Lorenzo di Bonaventura, former Warner Bros. Meanwhile, at least one well-known actress was reportedly passed over with that timeless showbiz rationale: “The studio said she wasn’t good-looking enough.” It was pretty much a foregone conclusion that Cruise, whose Interview casting Rice initially condemned, wouldn’t reprise his role when discussions of another Rice adaptation made their way to the table. The Anne Rice novel on which it was based had been published in 1976, followed by two sequels in the ’80s: The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned. Interview With the Vampire, directed by Neil Jordan, was the tenth-highest-grossing movie of 1994, earning two Oscar nominations and giving us still-famous performances from Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and a young Kirsten Dunst. What resulted is a mournful but spirited look at a pop star gone too soon, a movie complicated by adaptation woes and industry hubris, and a thorny slice of recent Hollywood history. To commemorate one of her last artistic endeavors, which was meant to feature an end-credits duet between her and Davis (Aaliyah was apparently a big Korn fan), Vulture called up a number of folks from in front of and behind the Queen of the Damned camera. Her legacy is surging now that her music catalogue is finally available on streaming platforms. Twenty years have passed since Aaliyah’s death. Queen of the Damned would be the final movie of Aaliyah’s young acting career, which began with Romeo Must Die and was slated to include The Matrix Reloaded and a Sparkle remake opposite Whitney Houston. But six months later, en route to Florida after shooting her “Rock the Boat” video in the Bahamas, she died in a plane crash. The R&B darling was 22 when production wrapped on the movie, and she was subsequently hoisted up by industry executives and producers as the perfect young face to sell many future films. Sparked back to life by Lestat’s music, she’s on the hunt for her conjurer, determined to make him her king. As the reanimated vampire monarch Akasha, she slinks through her scenes with commanding charisma, outfitted in an ornate headpiece and speaking in an eerie ADR-enhanced gravel voice. And yet Queen of the Damned developed a cult following, buoyed by Aaliyah’s passionate admirers and the plot’s goth-kitsch absurdity.Īaliyah is, after all, the highlight of Damned. Fans of Anne Rice’s novel of the same name - the third in her series about a vampire named Lestat, first portrayed onscreen by Tom Cruise in 1994’s deliciously homoerotic Interview With the Vampire - were disappointed to see her text so heavily altered in movie form. When it opened in theaters on February 22, 2002, reviews were bloody, and the box-office numbers were only mildly better. To some, that’s exactly how the movie plays. “It sounds like a bad Saturday Night Live skit,” says Richard Gibbs, who wrote the music for the film alongside Korn front man Jonathan Davis. Queen of the Damned is a movie about a vampire who awakens from a protracted slumber and becomes a rock star. Photo: ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection Aaliyah and director Michael Rymer on the set of Queen of the Damned.
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