British actor Robert Pattinson's break-out role in Twilight has girls swooning - and the movie hasn't even opened yet.
LOS ANGELES -There's no ignoring those lips, and Robert Pattinson is the first to admit it. They're red, almost blood red, and they took a lot of lipstick to create. Pattinson is not proud.
It wasn't as bad as having his naturally luxurious eyebrows plucked into submission for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. (At first I said, 'No way, that's for girls,' he said. But I let them.) Though it wasn't easy, either. The lipstick was piled on so thick that no amount of wiping could erase it entirely at the end of the workday.
Still, a basically unknown actor has to do what he has to do. In the case of playing the lead vampire in the widely anticipated Twilight, which opens Friday, that meant having a lot of white makeup airbrushed on and lipstick applied regularly. Pattinson doesn't know the exact shade. (In real life his lips are plump but a tad pale.)
I know, it's so embarrassing; it's really embarrassing, said Pattinson, laughing, as he often does, at the incongruity of his life now. I don't know, I never understood why I had lipstick on. I never understood a lot of things. I think I looked a little bit too dead.
Still, the 22-year-old Pattinson's career may be about to come to life in a major way. Advance ticket sales for Twilight, based on Stephenie Meyer's mega-selling novel for young adults, are enor mous. Teenage girls can't wait. And what they want is the face on the poster - the pouty pretty boy with the oddly glowing gold eyes.
In Twilight, Pattinson plays Edward Cullen, part of an immortal family of bloodsuckers living in Forks, Wash., where the constant cloud cover allows them to move about freely in the daylight that would otherwise cause them to glisten like gold. But these vampires are civilized. They gorge on animal blood instead of their neighbors', which is kind but never quite sates them. Of course there's a love interest for Pattinson, a girl named Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart from Into the Wild) who moves to Washington and enrolls at the same high school. She's actually the main character, and the one girls everywhere have related to in making Twilight the book a smash.
The novel intimidated Pattinson. In no uncertain terms, it describes his character as a physical god: not quite human, almost superhuman. Six-pack abs are a given. He's not just handsome, he's heartbreakingly so. Mostly he was not how Pattinson imagined himself at the time of his audition, when he described himself as relatively fat after a year of focusing on his music (piano, guitar, performing around London with a buddy).
More often than not, Pattinson has been cast as the geek rather than the guy who gets the girl. As a model from ages 12 to 15, he says he couldn't book a job. While he was in one of the Harry Potter movies - wizard-in-training Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) - he was, he says, in it for about five seconds.
I just sort of thought this is stupid going into this casting to play like the best-looking human thing ever created - and that's the whole point of his character, Pattinson said. My only idea for the role was to go in pouting, intensely pouting, and that was it. Then I met Kristen and she really played it unexpectedly and it kind of shocked me into thinking of something. And then I wanted to do the part afterward.
What he did not like, however, was the need to transform his body into some sort of unnatural fighting machine. For the first time in his life, the Brit started a fitness regimen (which, for the record, he hated every single second of and has long since stopped): kickboxing three hours a day, running another two, rarely eating. But instead of bulking up, his body wasted away. Director Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown) demanded he regain the weight.
In the book it's talking about him having this rock-solid body and blah blah blah and I didn't want to just do that for aesthetic reasons, Pattinson said. I was trying to think how he can have a six-pack without it being like I sold out... I want to lose every ounce of fat and have these long muscles, this sort of weird body, so it really looked like you could quite likely be seen as a monster.
Hardwicke, however, was looking more for male-female chemistry, even if it's of an inter-species sort. And she says she saw it almost the second she looked through the lens during Pattinson's screen test with Stewart. She went home to edit the footage, just to make sure her eyes weren't deceiving her.
He had a completely different look but I could still see it, Hardwicke said. He immediately got with a trainer because we wanted his body toned, to be able to be physical and accomplish all the stunts.
Robert really put everything into this, she continued. He learned to drive. He learned to play baseball, which he really took to great. We wanted to be true to the source material, and his Edward is Edward.
In person it's clear he was the man behind all that makeup, although no doppelganger. He's lankier and still pale, with gray-blue eyes that most likely don't glow in the dark. The smoldering squint is the same, though. His hair is messy, and he's got the all-but-required scruff of beard.
But he's also got that self-deprecating British wit (the American accent in the movie is a put-on), laughs at himself often, and is in fact a bit awkward. More accustomed to period dramas or fantasy films, he says he's only now getting to play normal. He says he's better suited for that than for the Adonis he plays in Twilight (although the word sequel comes up hopefully more than once).
Big sigh. The funny thing is I've been trying to get pretty boy roles for the last four years and nobody cast me, Pattinson said. It's like the world has changed its mind this year: 'Oh yeah, you're attractive, now we've decided.' I'm like, 'OK.'...
But the pretty boy thing isn't easy for me, he added, looking embarrassed at even using the term to describe himself. I literally have to be filmed from the right angle or I look deformed. I'm not just one of those guys you can shoot from any angle and they look perfect.
Pattinson, whose dad sold cars and whose mom handled bookings for a modeling agency, at first looked at acting as a way to help pay for his private school education. But he says he never cared if he got a part or got rejected. Still, he loved movies, particularly American movies, and particularly American movies starring Jack Nicholson. Now he's temporarily living in Los Angeles (rented everything) and he's set to star with Dennis Hopper and Rosario Dawson in Parts Per Billion, in which he plays an absolutely average American, he says excitedly.
But normal has ended for Pattinson for now. He's got girls asking him to bite their necks. Cameras snap unexpectedly. Friends step away when fans approach. He was recently recognized by the staff at his local In-N-Out Burger, where he prefers to read scripts over what he considers the more pretentious Starbucks.
Hey, aren't you... the staffer started out, and suddenly Pattinson couldn't concentrate anymore. I was like, 'Sigh, now I've got to find another place. I've got to go to Fatburger.'
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