The Vampire... Stuart? Part One

By: Paul Zimmerman
Date: Wednesday, February 27, 2002

You'd think an actor who had to step into Tom Cruise's shoes would be nervous. Not Stuart Townsend, who follows Cruise's interpretation of the vampire Lestat in Interview With THE Vampire with his own version of the charismatic bloodsucker in Queen of the Damned.

"I knew this film was much more tongue-and-cheek," says a jovial Townsend while promoting the film in Westwood, California. "It's rock 'n' roll and it's a different Lestat. I keep getting asked the question was it intimidating, but it's not like Sean Connery and Roger Moore," Townsend says laughing.

The dark-haired, Irish-born Townsend is clearly an easygoing guy with a lot on his table. Besides leading the vampires in Queen of the Damned, he also can be seen alongside Kevin Bacon in the forthcoming thriller 24 Hours.

In Queen

of the Damned, his Lestat, decked out a like some goth incarnation of Jim Morrision, returns from the coffin to become a rock star and the biggest entertainer in the world. The problem is, in becoming so public he pisses off all the press-shy vampires and awakens the original Queen of the Damned, Akasha -- a 6,000-year-old demon played by the late singer Aaliyah. To become this modern hybrid of Dracula and Elvis, Townsend watched performance tapes of some of rock's biggest legends.

"I saw Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger, all those greats, and the contemporaries like Marilyn Manson," Townsend says. "But for me David Bowie, performance-wise, was the best performer."

To become the world's most famous vampire he also watched some classic horror films.

"We did these rock videos that are incorporated into the film, and they were themed," he explains. "One of them was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and the other one was Nosferatu."

Undaunted by the Cruise mystique, he even braved Interview With THE Vampire.

"I [had] watched that years ago and I watched it again, and I'm glad I did because it was like a reintroduction into Anne Rice's themes," he says.

For Townsend, the vampire part of the role was easy and the rock part hard -- particularly the big concert climax where Lestat and his band play to thousands of fans and dozens of attacking vampires.

"The rock

star thing terrified me," Townsend says meekly. "I just tried to ignore that it was really ever going to happen. And the concert didn't happen for three months, so it was always in the back of my head: 'You're going to have to get up in front of 3,000 people.' So I was terrified. That was great, though, because it was the best night. When [you do] something you're most afraid of and it actually turns out great, it's the best."

Which was a surprise, since by Townsend's own admission he can't sing a lick.

"I'm a talentless fuck," he says, laughing out loud. "But I tried hard. They asked me would I do Jonathan Davis [the lead singer of Korn, who wrote the music for Lestat's band]. Because they were having legal battles and whatever, the stuff that lawyers do. So they asked me, [explaining that] it might happen that I might have to do his voice impersonation. And I said, 'You've got to be kidding.' I mimed his voice for two days and I couldn't speak. My voice was just gone."

Others trials and tribulations for cast members included months spent wearing fake fangs, though Townsend didn't mind his.

"We had great teeth," he says. "We had our day-to-day wear ones, which were just little ones, and then you had the big saber[-toothed]-type ones. And you had to be careful because occasionally you get a nip [from those], but the day-to-day wear, you didn't even notice they were in."

And the taste of fake blood?

"Like coffee. Nasty."

Less fun was the makeup, which combined with some digital retouching make Lestat's skin resemble white marble. Townsend shudders at the mere mention of this.

"The worst

was the white paint, the body stuff, because that took an hour," he says. "And you could never do it in the trailer, so you always had to be outside, and it was freezing, and you're getting spray-painted with this cold white paint. You end up picking white things out of your nose for a few days -- it's pretty bad."

Asked if there was someone on the set to do that for him, Townsend laughs hard and cracks, "For Tom Cruise, maybe, but not for me!"

Still, his painting woes aren't his strangest memory of the production. That would be the green-screen effects.

"It's really weird, that stuff," Townsend says, shaking his head. "You go into a room and there would be a stills photographer there. You'd get up on this platform that was marked out and you'd stand there behind this screen, and he'd take one shot of you, move you and the whole platform, and take another shot. All the way around, just keep taking shots, and then say, 'OK, thank you.' All these markers and pink balls and a green screen -- it's pretty odd."

Check back soon for part two of our Stuart Townsend profile.