Lestat: Listen, Louis. There's life in these old hands still. Not quite Furioso. Moderato? Cantabile, perhaps.
Claudia: How can it be?
Lestat: Ask the alligator. His blood helped. Then on a diet of the blood of snakes, toads, and all the putrid life of the Mississippi, slowly, Lestat became something like himself again. Claudia... You've been a very, very, naughty little girl.
Louis: That morning I was not yet a vampire, and I saw my last sunrise. I remember it completely, and yet I can't recall any sunrise before it. I watched the whole magnificence of the dawn for the last time as if it were the first. And then I said farewell to sunlight, and set out to become what I became.
Santiago: Suppose death had a heart to love and to release you, to whom would he turn this passion? Would you chose a person from the crowd there? A person to suffer as you suffer?
Louis: You lack the courage of your convictions, sir. Do it.
Armand: You are beautiful, my friend. Lestat must have wept when he made you.
Louis: Lestat? You knew Lestat?
Armand: Knew him well enough not to mourn his passing.
Lestat: Merciful death. How you love your precious guilt.
Louis: So it was, when I'd given up the search for vampires, that a vampire found me.
Daniel Molloy: So a vampire can cry.
Louis: Once, maybe twice in his own eternity. Maybe it was to quench those tears forever that I took such revenge on them.
Santiago: Do you know what it means to be loved by Death? To become our bride?
Lestat: There's nothing in the world now that doesn't hold some sort of.
Louis: Fascination.
Lestat: Yes. I'm bored of this prattle.
Louis: But if we can live without taking human life? It's possible.
Lestat: Anything's possible. Just try it for a week. Come to New Orleans. Let me show you some real sport.
Lestat: Do we forgive each other then?
Louis: For 30 years I had avoided that place. Yet I found my way back there with hardly an upward glance.
Daniel Molloy: What about crucifixes?
Louis: Crucifixes?
Daniel Molloy: Yes, can you look at them?
Louis: Actually I am quite fond of looking at crucifixes.
Daniel Molloy: What about the old stake through the heart?
Louis: Nonsense.
Daniel Molloy: Coffins? What about coffins?
Louis: Coffins. Coffins, I'm afraid, are a necessity.
Louis: Thirty years had passed, but her body remained that of an eternal child. Her eyes alone told the story of her age, staring out from under her doll-like curls, with a questioning that will one day need an answer.
Louis: Lestat killed two, sometimes three a night. A fresh young girl, that was his favorite for the first of the evening. For seconds, he preferred a gilded beautiful youth. But the snob in him loved to hunt in society, and the blood of the aristocrat thrilled him best of all.
Answer: Daniel Day Lewis was offered the part, but turned it down. There's also a rumour, that I've never seen confirmed, that Johnny Depp was approached - if true, he presumably said no. The studio wanted a good name in the role (Lewis was riding high in Hollywood after "The Last of the Mohicans", Depp was very much an up-and-coming actor at the time) so Cruise would have seemed like an obvious choice. He was initially cast against the wishes of Anne Rice (who created Lestat with Rutger Hauer in mind) - after seeing his performance, however, she made a public apology for doubting him.
Tailkinker ★