Robert Pattinson spoke with Jennifer Lopez for Variety’s Actors on Actors series and confessed that he just doesn't get Twilight, the movie that catapulted him to fame.
"It’s a weird story, Twilight. It’s not just like – it’s strange how people responded I think a lot to it. I guess the books are very romantic, but at the same time, it’s not just like The Notebook romantic. The Notebook is very, very sweet and heartbreaking and stuff, but Twilight is about this guy, and he finds the one girl he wants to be with, and also wants to eat her. I mean, not eat her, but drink her blood or whatever,” Pattinson said.
He's not wrong. In the wildly successful book-to-film series, he plays vampire Edward Cullen who sparkles in the sunshine and falls in love with surly teen Bella Swan played by Kristen Stewart.
The book series and corresponding films were so popular that teens flocked to Forks, Washington, where the series took place to see the overcast town in real life and find a vampire or werewolf of their own.
“It’s not that other people are telling them they can’t be together, it’s his own body telling him that," he explained to Lopez, who compared it to Romeo and Juliet. Although looking at it now, they should have had more people telling them they couldn't be together as they have quite the age difference - Edward Cullen was born in 1901.
Pattinson told Lopez, "With Twilight, it wasn’t really an established thing. To me, Catherine Hardwicke who directed it had done this movie called ‘Thirteen’ and this other movie called Lords of Dogtown, and they were like little movies. Kind of cool, hardcore movies. And Kristen [Stewart] was in stuff as well, like she’d been in Into the Wild, and it was kind of very indie," he said. Now, viewers know that Twilight wasn't exactly a little indie film in the vein of Thirteen. Instead, it was a mega-blockbuster with five different films in the franchise.
Up next, he's moving away from the indie films he's been appearing in, which he describes as "what I wanted to be doing in the first place." He'll be donning a black suit instead of sparkly skin to play Batman in 2021 - and there's no way that will be an indie flick.
