Blast releases a special TWILIGHT EXTRA issue of the magazine on Monday with photos and video from the event, a longer interview with Robert Pattinson, our movie review, and more!
SAUGUS, Mass. — The teenage girl came out of the Hot Topic store, eyes glazed with a silly smile on her face. Her mother ran up to meet her, just as the words started tumbling out of the daughter’s lips.
He talked to me, she gasped, as her mother smiled along but tried to calm the teen down.
She has epilepsy, the mother explained, and I don’t want her to seize.
Then she scooped up her daughter and hurried away, without giving her name, to make room for the next giggling girl.
Fan dedication: defined.
She was just one of hundreds who flocked to the Square One Mall north of Boston on Friday. The object of their fanaticism wasn’t one of the Jonas Brothers or Miley Cyrus, but rather a soft-spoken, spiky-haired Brit named Robert Pattinson.
In the words of one indignant passerby who was turned away from shopping at the barricaded Hot Topic: He isn’t even famous.
Though Pattinson, 22, may not be a household name yet, to the fan community of Stephenie Meyer’s vampire Twilight series, (and hardcore Harry Potter fans who remember he played Cedric Diggory) he is second to none. Playing the lead male character Edward in the upcoming vampire film Twilight, the fan hysteria has reached peak heights.
At first I thought maybe he wasn’t as good for Edward, but now I think he’s perfect, said Selys Rivera, 14, of Worcester. He’s completely perfect for Edward. He’s amazing.
Pattinson, along with co-stars Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner, Edi Gathegi and Rachelle Lefavre, is headlining the Hot Topic-sponsored movie tour to promote Twilight in the final days before the film’s release on November 21. The Saugus event was Pattinson’s third and final stop on the tour after the event scheduled in San Francisco was canceled after fans mobbed the mall.
Pattinson, Stewart, and the trio of Lautner, Gathegi and Lefavre toured to 13 cities across the U.S. from November 10 through November 15.
[The hysteria] hasn’t died down at all, Pattinson told Blast in a brief interview at the Saugus Hot Topic. It happened in [Italy], it happened in Mexico. It’s completely ridiculous.
Here in Saugus, the crowd was much tamer than the events in San Francisco and Chicago. Wristbands were given, starting at 9 p.m. Thursday, to the first 500 people who bought the Hot Topic official “Twilight” tour T-shirt. The Saugus police were no-nonsense about the event and were a steady presence around the mall throughout the night.
We got here at about 9 p.m. yesterday and we were there like all night long, said Attleboro resident Amanda Pease, 20. We only left to go to Starbucks.
At 5 p.m. Friday, a crowd of a couple hundred girls had gathered around a stage that was set up for Pattinson to speak to the fans for the question and answer portion of the event. Some had camped out for more than 20 hours just for the chance to meet their beloved Edward, while others had arrived only moments before to wait around until Pattinson spoke at on the stage.
A security presence was felt. A barricade was set up like a moat around the stage to protect Pattinson from the overzealousness of any rabid fan-girls.
Blast has not heard reports of any of the other Twilight character events going as wildly insane as Pattinson’s. His response to questions about whether he had talked to his fellow cast members since the tour began: I haven’t actually. Do you how they’re [events are] going?
A couple minutes after 6 p.m., the fans started to trickle out of the store with awe-struck faces and trembling hands.I went up there and he was so nice. He actually asked me like how everything has been and whether I was okay, and I was just like so speechless. I was just like, ‘I love you so much and I can’t wait to see you in the movie! I can’t wait to see you in all of your movies!’ said Pease, who admitted that she had not known Pattinson had acted in any other movie other than Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Pease’s boyfriend, Bill Brauneis, 21, of Attleboro was a bit more conservative with his enthusiasm about seeing Pattinson.
It was great. I was looking forward to meeting him, he said.
The fan reactions were noted, even by the authorities that were there for security.
They all came out like zombies, like they’d been bit by a vampire,” said Saugus fire Lieutenant Eric Hansen.
Television crews swarmed on girl after girl who came out sobbing hysterically in the aftermath of meeting Pattinson. A couple kind words from the actor were translated into confessions of attraction and admissions of love.
One girl walked up to her group of friends after exiting the Hot Topic with a giddy smile on her face, whispered I told him I loved him, and burst into a bout of giggles.
He’s cuter in person, another girl proclaimed to the next batch of fans waiting to be admitted into the Hot Topic.
Pattinson said that when he was first cast into the role of Edward, he did not realize how big the Twilight phenomenon truly was.
If I was doing [the movie] now, knowing it was going to be this audience, I think I probably would have done it differently, said Pattinson. But I think, at the end of the day, it’s a good thing I went into it thinking [Twilight] is a small thing because it essentially is. It’s a small story; it’s an intimate story, and I think it comes across as being very human rather than being a big epic thing.
There is a lot of pressure on the actors and creators of the film adaptation of Twilight to get everything perfectly right for the fans who will scrutinize every detail of the film to see how it compares to the novel.
Most fans said that they liked all the clips of the film they had seen thus far, but 25-year-old Sarah Kontos of Worcester said that the raciness of the Bella and Edward make-out scene, shown in Summit’s final Twilight trailer, gave her pause.
In the book, she wears like ratty old pajama pants with holes in them, and she’s not like sexy, so it was weird to see that in one of the trailers, said Kontos. I kind of was mad. That would give people who didn’t read the book a totally wrong impression of that part.
Director Catherine Hardwicke has said in interviews that Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight series, asked her to tone down the make-out scene that was originally shot because she would have nothing to work with in the later adaptations of the novel.
As the crowds waiting for their signed posters thinned out, the police presence in front of the Hot Topic grew from three to 12 officers. Echoes of Robert! Robert! could be heard throughout the mall as the clock struck 7:30 p.m. and the fans gathered around the stage shouted impatiently for the culmination of their long wait. Though Pattinson was escorted through back passageways to get to the stage, a large crowd of fans who were not among the lucky 500 to meet Pattinson gathered around the entrance to the Hot Topic on the off chance that he would pass by them.
As soon as Pattinson appeared on the stage for the question and answer session, the chatter turned to a unified shrieking scream that thundered around the interior of the mall. Lieutenant Hansen had to plug his fingers in his ears to dull out the ear-piercing sound of what is sure to be the high point in some of the fans’ teenage lives.
The questions were submitted by fans earlier in the day and were handpicked by Pattinson. Pattinson may not be known universally, like Brad Pitt or Michael Jackson, but the obsession that surrounds him by his dedicated fan base is enough to counter the indifference of the general public. If Twilight is a success when it is released on Friday, the name Pattinson will be sure to mean something.
Though his initial popularity is based on his role in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and now Edward Cullen in Twilight, Pattinson has directed his focus toward indie films. His next major role is in the drama How To Be.
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