The star of the teen vampire romance shares with GT how he'll leave a mark
Twilight is the most anticipated film of the season but even headliner Robert Pattinson can't grasp the enormity of its popularity—or his for that matter.
"I feel as if I’ve been in this Twilight bubble where I never see the outside world," the 22-year-old star says in a recent GT interview. " I get a lot of people saying, 'How does it feel to be an overnight sensation?' But I literally have not been to a restaurant in such a long time. I have no idea what my real life is like any more. Maybe when the film comes out and I go back to London, I can actually see what the real difference is."
The movie (** out of four), which opened nationwide this week, is based on the 2005 "young adult" bestseller of the same name by Stephanie Meyer. It chronicles the life, love and angst of teen vamp Edward Cullen, whose extraordinary powers and sense of perception captures the attention of Bella, played by Kristen Stewart.
Interestingly enough, Pattinson, who had stints in two Harry Potter films, didn't read the "Twilight" novels before auditioning for the lead role. "I was living in England and it wasn’t big there," he says. "I actually tried to read it five months before when somebody had told me about it, and I read a few pages, and I thought, 'Oh, this isn’t my thing.' And I didn’t know that there was a phenomenon. I thought it was a little bit 'girly.' But then I read the script and it cut out a lot of the descriptions Edward was saying. It read more like an action script. So later, I went back to the book afterward and saw what the differences had been. I looked at a bit more objectively. I liked the book better when I came back to it the second time."
As for mentally crawling into the skin of Edward, Pattinson noted that his biggest pressure was worrying about "Edward having to be attractive."
"I mean that was the thing in the book—the key thing was that he be attractive," he adds. "And it was especially challenging when you’re trying to be frightening and pretty at the same time. It’s quite a complicated scenario, especially when you have to stay PG-13.
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Is he saying he doesn't think he's attractive? "I think I am attractive … in some ways," Pattinson laughs. "Definitely a little bit shy."
There was also the pressure of Twilight being Pattinson's first American film. "I had a lot to think about in terms of the franchise—think about three films," he says. "And for that there has to be a matrix laid out, which is quite a heavy workload. And a lot of the movie, I guess I am kind of responsible for it. I haven’t done anything 'big,' which I feel responsible for. I had no real experience of having to hold a film myself.”
Fans of the book don't seem worried. There's so much online buzz, no doubt the film will take home the Number One spot in its opening weekend. In the meantime, Pattinson has already dashed off to another city for yet another round of promotional interviews. Asked whether he believed in the supernatural, and vampires, in particular, the young actor sighed and quipped: "I barely know any 'humans,' so I guess I can’t really guess.”
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