When the vampire’s away, the werewolf will come out to play. “New Moon,” opening today, is the second chapter of “The Twilight Saga,” or “Will He Bite Her, and If So, When?” With more than 1,000 theaters already sold out , the film’s young lovers have become pop-culture icons. We talked with Bella, Edward and Jacob recently at Beverly Hills’ Four Seasons Hotel, where security was high. If word got out they were there, the place would have been overrun. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it.
Meet Edward
There is no rest for the undead, particularly if you’re the vampire Edward Cullen, described in Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” novels as “devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful.”
Two years ago, when Robert Pattinson was announced as the choice to play Edward, the book fans described the actor in another way. They called him “skinny” and “unsuitable.”
“My mother,” he said, “read those reports back in London, but I never saw them. My mother reads all the tabloid things. I try, as best I can, to ignore them. Little or none of it is true. I haven’t had but three days off since last January, so how wild could I be? The more boring my life becomes, the more sordid things they claim I’m doing. I can’t go out of my hotel. I can’t go to restaurants. Sometimes, I can go to a friend’s place for dinner, if I’m careful to sneak out of the hotel. I’m not complaining. It’s just a new way of life.”
He’s getting $10 million for the “Twilight” franchise, which includes two more movies after today’s release of “The Twilight Saga: New Moon.” He’s already finished shooting “Eclipse,” the third movie, which is set to open in June. Apparently the race is on to get all four movies made before the principals get too old for their parts. Pattinson’s 23, which seems safe. Edward, after all, is something like 101.
Two years ago he was an unemployed actor who was about to be thrown out of what he described as his “tawdry” little flat in London. He had been living off the proceeds of his role as Cedric Diggory in the “Harry Potter” films. As the painter Salvador Dali in the movie “Little Ashes,” which played locally at Norfolk’s Naro Expanded Cinema, he had a nude scene, but, he said, “there were a hundred or so crew guys standing around. It was a bore. No one cared.”
He’s been in pursuit of show business since he was 12. His mother worked for a modeling agency and his father sold cars. “I was the world’s worst model for several jobs,” he said. “They always wanted me to appear as a little boy.”
Kristen Stewart had been cast as Bella when he came in as one of the last of hundreds seeking to play Edward.
“I had never read the books and I had no idea I’d get it,” he said. “I didn’t see it as a vampire thing at all but a drama of commitment and finding someone you love but not knowing if you are good enough for them or if you can protect them.” Edward is a vampire who doesn’t want to feed on human blood, and does not want to lure Bella, in particular, over to the dark side. If Edward bites her, she’ll become a vampire and lose her innocence and humanity.
Pattinson’s carefully moussed hair has the disheveled look of a Victorian Lord Byron – a look he touches up occasionally by running his hands through the mop. He is wearing a flannel sports shirt topped by a laser-like stare from beneath heavily browed eyes. If you added mystic lighting, yes, he might look like a vampire.
In real life, he seems rather vulnerable – a little like a deer caught in the headlights.
On his fame, he has one, succinct, thing to say: “I feel judged.”
On “New Moon,” he said, “the hardest scenes to play are ones in which I am the manifestation of Bella’s loneliness, not a real character at all. I actually am not in the plot very much in the book. We break up and I go away, but in the movie, she has manifestations of me. It’s not Edward at all; it’s her idea of him. Edward is always aloof. That’s the way he is. You can’t relax and play him. No way. I feel akin to him in that I have no life. I’m alone all the time. I feel he’s exactly the same.”
Early in the film, he has a tough scene in which he breaks up with Bella. “It’s the ideal relationship, and, yet, he fears for her life but doesn’t want to tell her that’s why he’s leaving. Yet again, he is feeling what he isn’t saying, and that’s difficult to play. I always fear that it will be melodramatic. That is always the fear.”
He has no publicity agent (as if he needs one) and claims that “I have no idea of how I’m perceived. I’d like to be perceived only as the character, but they write a lot of perceptive stories in magazines that mystify me. Some magazine wrote that I was pregnant and that’s why I always wear a jacket. That’s maybe the wildest one. It’s just a circus out there. I laugh at the stories, but I’ve come to realize that in interviews like this I have to stop being so self-deprecating or someone out there will start to think that I actually am an idiot.”
“I think the fans are quite disappointed if they actually meet me,” he said. “If I’d go out and talk to them for five minutes or so, they’d be bored. They need the mystery. They all say the same thing. I met a woman who was 92 years old, and she said the same things a 12-year-old girl said. No difference.”
What is the most romantic movie he’s every seen? “Either 'Gone With the Wind’ or 'Titanic.’ ”
What’s the most romantic thing he’s ever done? After a long pause, “Well, I’d say that when I was 14, I put a flower in a girl’s locker at school, but she thought someone else put it there and he got the date with her. Still, for me, that was a pretty daring thing to do.”
What is your favorite movie vampire? “Wesley Snipes? I think he was pretty cool.”
Aside from the “Twilight” assignments, he will appear in the drama “Remember Me” and then a Western in which he plays a youth kidnapped by the Commanches.
“I speak native Commanche for most of the movie,” he said. “It will be very different. That’s what I need right now – something very different.”
Next:
Meet Bella
Meet Jacob
Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com
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