Robert Pattinson Thought Twilight Was a 'Weird Story': 'It's Strange How People Responded'
Robert Pattinson is still confused by Twilight‘s popularity.
The hit vampire franchise made him one of the hottest actors in Hollywood, but Pattinson says he wasn’t looking to star in a blockbuster when he signed on. Instead, he considered the first entry a small-scaled movie with some great talent attached.
“With Twilight, it wasn’t really an established thing,” Pattinson, 33, told Jennifer Lopez in Variety‘s latest Actors on Actors series.
“To me, Catherine Harwicke, who directed it, had done a movie called Thirteen and another movie called Lords of Dogtown. They were little movies and they were cool, hardcore movies. And Kristen [Stewart] was in stuff as well, she’d been in Into the Wild and some other things. It was very, very indie,” he explained.
As Pattinson recalled to Lopez, when he signed on to do Twilight, it was the bizarre story that interested him.
“I mean, it’s a weird story, Twilight. It’s strange how people responded,” he said of the cultural phenomenon it became. “They are very romantic, but at the same time, it’s not like The Notebook romantic. The Notebook is very, very sweet and heartbreaking and stuff. Twilight is about this guy who finds the one girl he wants to be with, and also wants to eat her. Well not eat her, drink her blood, whatever.”
“I thought there were definitely bits that were very romantic,” he continued. “But to me, I thought it was a pretty weird story. and even when I was promoting it, I was pretty open about how strange I thought it was when I was doing it.”
Jennifer Lopez tells Robert Pattinson that she got to know him when he did #Twilight, and asks why he's returning to studio films with #Batman pic.twitter.com/rXuH8iyFeT
— Variety (@Variety) November 13, 2019
And the actor almost lost out on his star-making role. Pattinson told The New York Times last year that his rebellious behavior on the set of the first film, released in 2008, nearly got him fired.
Fortunately for Pattinson and his legion of fans, his agents flew in to smooth things over — and the actor now calls working on the series “an amazing luxury.”
“I didn’t have to kiss anybody’s [butt] the entire time. I don’t think I did, anyway,” Pattinson told the Times
Pattinson also looks back fondly on the bond he formed with his fellow Twilight cast mates, which included Stewart, Taylor Lautner and Anna Kendrick.
It was “amazing luck, as well, to just have fallen into it with the group of people I worked with on it.”
And although Pattinson is still-best known as Edward Cullen, he is at peace with the role that made him a star even as he branches out to grittier projects.
“I think one of the best things, basically, about being a bit of a sellout, is if you’ve done five movies in a series, you’ve had to accept some responsibility for playing the same character,” he told the Times.
