Something to sink his teeth into

• Last Updated: November 21. 2009 1:18PM UAE / November 21. 2009 9:18AM GMT

Robert Pattinson, the vampire hunk of the Twilight film series, has won praise for his ability to get deep inside his characters. The star of New Moon, which will hit UAE screens next week, talks to Peter Howell about fame, fight scenes and his on- and off-screen frailties.



As Edward Cullen, the vampire hunk of the Twilight films, Robert Pattinson’s smouldering gaze, pale sculpted features and windswept hair arouse comparisons with grand figures of literature and film. He’s like Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, many admirers say. Others suggest Lord Byron, the Romantic poet, or James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause.

Not bad for a guy who, according to vampire lore, has no pulse. He’s the sexiest undead man alive.

Right now, though, as the British actor prepares for this week’s release in the UAE of New Moon, the first of three Twilight sequels, the role of regular bloke sounds better. He could use a little of the peace and quiet he enjoyed until a year ago when he was still a relative unknown.

“It’s completely nuts,” Pattinson, 23, says of his sudden global acclaim. “I had lunch in some restaurant the other day down the street and if you’re in a place for more than an hour, word gets out. There were like 500 or 600 people outside, watching and waiting for me.”

For this interview with a vampire, Pattinson sits in a sunny room in the south of France designed for mortal comforts. There are no crystal decanters of blood or vestal virgins to sup on. Arrayed before him on a glass table shaped like a kneeling Greek goddess are a bowl of crisps, packages of green apple mint gum and an expensive box of chocolates. A candle with the exotic scent of pineapple cilantro burns nearby.

Pattinson ignores all the calorific temptations as he nips off to another room for a few drags on a cigarette. “I’m sorry,” he says, pausing only to shake hands. “I’ll be right back.” He returns a few minutes later, flashing a smile filled with extraordinarily white teeth. Despite the heat on this May day at the Cannes Film Festival, where he’s fulfilling press and business duties before jetting to Vancouver to film Eclipse, the second Twilight sequel, he’s dressed for cooler climes. He sports two shirts (a short-sleeved one over a T-shirt) and jeans with holes in the knees.

The London-born actor’s heavily moussed hair looks like it has been styled by the fingers of some ravaging fans of the blockbuster Twilight books and film that have made him into a teen scream sensation.

He was not yet a teen himself when he first caught the public eye, as a model at age 12. The impetus for that may have come from his older sisters, Elizabeth and Victoria, who used to love dressing up their baby brother to look like a girl they called “Claudia”. Pattinson jokes that his penchant for hair gel may be the result of having been a living doll for his sisters.

He had connections in the modelling business, since his mother Clare worked for an agency. Growing up in London, he also had exposure to the finer things in life, because his father, Robert Sr, is the successful importer of vintage cars.

In his early teens, Pattinson developed an interest in acting, partly the result of his admiration for Jack Nicholson, whom he first saw in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. He performed in stage productions of Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Macbeth, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Cole Porter’s Anything Goes. But as Pattinson explains in a DVD interview for How To Be, a 2008 movie comedy in which he plays a depressed musician looking for life motivation, he had a bit of an existential crisis around the time he reached his 20s. “At the time I didn’t know if I wanted to be an actor. I didn’t know, really, what I was doing. I hadn’t gone to university. I was just kind of bumming around... I wasn’t feeling particularly good at anything and at the same time, I was desperately wanting to be.”

Pattinson has been making films only since 2004, when he had a bit part in Mira Nair’s Vanity Fair, which was cut out of the theatrical release (it’s on the DVD).

His one burning ambition, more than acting, was to become a singer-songwriter. An accomplished musician, Pattinson has been playing piano since the age of three and guitar from the age of five. He sings and performs two songs on the Twilight soundtrack, Let Me Sign and Never Think, the latter of which he co-wrote. He calls music his “back-up plan if acting fails” but that’s not likely to happen any time soon.

Pattinson is animated and engaging, quite unlike his brooding character Edward, who is so pale and taciturn as to seem almost like a depressed mime. He is also considerably younger: Edward is 108 years old, although he forever possesses the physique of the human teenager he once was. Pattinson used the approach of a method actor, trying to move the way a vampire does. The feat was complicated by the idea he avoid acting like a typical bloodsucker, based on the desire of director Catherine Hardwicke, the film’s producers and Twilight novelist Stephenie Meyer.

“They kept saying they wanted to reinvent the genre of the vampire film, so I was really just trying to figure out how to play a vampire not as a vampire,” Pattinson says, running a hand through his brown locks. “I looked at a lot of movement in samurai films, because of the stillness, none of which I particularly used. It just sort of felt Zen.”

He finally determined that the key to understanding Edward was being alone. “I spent a lot of time by myself. I tried not to talk to too many people. My initial instinct was not to talk to anybody at all, so my first line would be like the first time I had spoken in a month, so you could get that kind of weird dialect. But it’s quite tough to do that,” he says with a laugh.

He certainly succeeded. Meyer, whose books have sold 17 million copies worldwide with translation rights in 37 countries, says finding the right actor to play Edward was even tougher than casting the role of the female lead Bella Swan, Edward’s human girlfriend, who is played by Kristin Stewart.

“He has to be everything,” Meyer says in the film’s production notes. “He has to be beautiful and dangerous and angst-ridden and intelligent. A lot of guys were pretty, but they weren’t dangerous. Other guys were dangerous but not pretty enough. Rob Pattinson has both sides.”

Pattinson quickly found that playing a high-profile fictional character requires you to live the role a bit in real life. “I have to be slightly more disciplined in my life because of what the character is. You get judged against that. So I guess you have to really be stricter with yourself. It is interesting how people do judge you in comparison to the character, even though you’re just an actor.”

Tougher still has been living up to expectations of what Twilight fans expect of Pattinson and Stewart, who had to fit the images of Edward and Bella that had been firmly conjured by imagination. So far, fans have given the actors an enthusiastic thumbs up, to the point of fantasising about them as a couple in real life, something both Pattinson and Stewart have denied is the case, albeit not terribly convincingly, with “we’re just friends” shrugs. (The flames of the supposed romance were fanned this past summer by tabloid reports while the duo were in Vancouver filming Eclipse, which is scheduled for release in summer 2010. The newspapers had the couple married off and even expecting a baby, although Pattinson knocks the rumours in a cover story in the December issue of Vanity Fair.)

New Moon might throw people for a loop, especially the ones who haven’t read the book. There’s trouble in paradise in this one, with another claimant to Bella’s cuddles and Edward suddenly seeming not so invincible. The film also has to work around the logistical problem of Edward being more in Bella’s mind than in her eyes at this stage of the unconventional love saga.

Twilight was the scene setter, the meeting and cautious early courtship of Edward and Bella that only hinted at the complications to come in this vampire/human coupling. New Moon (the full title is The Twilight Saga: New Moon) raises the temperature considerably, revealing the full identity of a character briefly introduced in Twilight and negotiating a love triangle that arises out of miscommunication and loneliness.

The actor is completely confident that New Moon, directed by Chris Weitz (About A Boy, The Golden Compass), will be another huge success. “I don’t know why anyone would be worried about people going to see it, because they will go and see it, I think. It sticks relatively closely to the book; it’s just that in the book it’s just Edward’s voice in Bella’s head and that’s really Edward’s only presence. I think it would just be cheesy if you had that [in the film], and it would be really difficult for Kristen to play, if it was just a voice. My presence in it is very faint. I’m a hallucination.”

There is, however, a fight scene created for the movie, in which Pattinson is not the least bit ghostly. We’re not talking about a lover’s spat here: it’s a battle to the finish with an outside threat. “The fight scene was really fun. It’s the only fight scene I’ve ever done in which I actually look like I’m quite good at fighting in it. I’m quite happy with that.”

But as enjoyable as filming New Moon was, it represents a significant turning point in Edward’s understanding that being immortal doesn’t necessary mean being immune from pain. “I think a lot of the movie... is that this character whom everything thinks is so untouchable and superhuman just gets so humbled… it’s an interesting moment to play when you’re like, ‘I just can’t do anything.’ I’ve been telling this girl, ‘I’m protecting you, I’m protecting you,’ and you get to a circumstance where you can’t do that, and it shows him in the most humiliating way.”

The Twilight saga is freighted with the expectations of parents and other moral authorities who have praised the series for promoting chastity. Many online wags refer to Edward as “the 108-year-old virgin” because he makes reference to having saved himself for the right woman. Pattinson chuckles at all the chastity talk. He thinks Twilight is quite sexy, although it’s much more of the mind than the body, since Edward has to sheath his pointy teeth to protect his beloved Bella.

Pattinson’s sense of humour has stood him in good stead over his whirlwind of a year. Prior to 2008, he was best known as Cedric Diggory, a minor character in two Harry Potter films. Cedric is a hunky jock at Hogwarts School, who naturally gets all the girls and vexes nerdy Harry, but he’s not all bad.

It was while playing Cedric that Pattinson had his first taste of insane fame. It was during a day of filming Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire at Oxford University when the Potter gang ran smack-dab into a group of teenaged girls from France who were on a school trip. “We ended up coming out of our cars at exactly the same moment and being surrounded in this crowd. And nobody even knew who I was playing at that point. When I said Cedric, it was, ‘Omigod! Cedric!’ Whatever.”

Pattinson was alarmed at first by all the attention – he considers himself shy and retiring – but is smart enough to know it won’t last forever, and doesn’t necessarily extend beyond his link with Twilight.

His other two films of the past year, How To Be and Little Ashes, failed to make an impact at the box office, despite demonstrating his impressive range as an actor. In the drama Little Ashes, he plays Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali, who has a passionate friendship with Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, played by Javier Beltrán. As with Edward, Pattinson was determined to get the painter right to the last dab, more than just adopting his tiny little mustache.

“I can’t tell you how hard he worked on the role of Dali,” the Little Ashes director Paul Morrision told the Los Angeles Times. “I was encouraging him to just play the script but he was hunting down every day bits of film or tape or interviews or a biography of Dali. He worked really hard at it, both intellectually and emotionally. I think that’s in his blood now. I don’t think he’ll be satisfied with playing less than interesting roles.”

The quest for perfection makes Pattinson’s work a lot harder and his schedule a lot busier than it might be, something of which he is well aware.

He sighs when he is reminded of all the movies he has committed to in the next two years, including Bel Ami, a film based on a Guy de Maupassant short story in which he will play opposite Nicole Kidman.

“I’m a little worried about that,” he says of his film commitments. “I like to have a lot of prep time. My filming periods are longer than they need to be. I could have a month off here and there but I want to be in the place where I’m working.”

So everything about being a movie star is still fresh and not so terrible, all things considered?

“It’s just this fame thing,” he muses. “It’s just something you have to learn how to deal with. It’s strange. It’s definitely so new, I don’t really know how I’m going to react to it in the long run.

“I was fighting against it for quite a while and just recently I realised there’s nothing you can do; you can’t just turn your back on it. Now I can pretty much go anywhere in the world and within minutes of being in a restaurant, tons of people come up to you. So you might as well just learn to have acceptance.”

Oddly enough, even though Pattinson enjoys reading, he has never felt inclined to crack the pages of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the book that started it all.

And he’s also not much into watching vampire movies.

“I’m not really particularly a fan of anything. I was never like a vampire fan, definitely. I liked the original Nosferatu. I always thought that was an interesting movie. I like the way it was shot. The actor’s name was Max Schreck. I like his performance in it a lot.

“In Interview With A Vampire, I always thought Christian Slater’s was the best part (Slater plays the interviewer, a human). I’m not really a horror fan, either. I don’t have any specific genre of which I could say that I’m a fan.”

Pattinson’s samurai Zen vampire philosophy has a bottom line: he’s determined not to be ruined by fame. He sounds completely serious when he says he is trying hard not to take his situation too seriously.

“I never set out to achieve any of this, so then I don’t connect to it. I don’t feel like, ‘See? See all this work I did?’

“It’s the character, so it’s all just a fluke. And really, all my life, it’s been a question of how to handle things afterwards. I don’t feel like I’m changing, and I don’t want to change, either.”



The Twilight Saga: New Moon opens in the UAE on November 26

PREVIOUS STAKEHOLDERS

The Twilight book and film franchises may be the most popular vampire romances, but they’re not the first bite at such dangerous love.

The deadly kiss has been a staple of vampire lore since Bram Stoker’s seminal gothic novel Dracula, published in 1897. The title ghoul, played most famously by Bela Lugosi in films, fancies himself a ladies man with a taste for crimson passion. Some other notable examples of vampire amour:

Vampire Academy

These best-selling fantasy/romance novels by the American author Richelle Mead first hit the shelves in 2007, with the fifth in the series scheduled for release next May. The heroine is 17-year-old Rose, a human/vampire hybrid who is training to be a bodyguard at St Vladimir’s Academy, hidden in the woods of Montana. She wants to keep the forces of evil away from her best friend, a magical princess vampire named Lissa, but love interferes when Rose falls for her instructor, Dimitri.

Bram Stoker's Dracula

Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 gothic horror heightens the romantic aspects of Stoker’s novel. Highly sensual while also very bloody, it casts Winona Ryder in the dual roles of Elisabeta, the lost love for whom Count Dracula mourns, and Mina, the latter-day woman who seems like Elisabeta reborn. Dracula, played by Gary Oldman, will stop at nothing to get her back. Vampire hunter Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) has other ideas.

Blade

A 1998 film based on the groundbreaking Marvel Comics series featuring a black protagonist, a vampire avenger played by Wesley Snipes. He has the strength of a vampire but the conscience of a human, the result of his mother being attacked by a bloodsucker prior to his birth. Incredibly gory, the film has Blade falling for a human haematologist named Karen (N’Bushe Wright), whom he must battle to defend when she becomes the prey of the day.

Underworld

A lot like New Moon in its theme of vampires fighting werewolves, this 2003 kickoff to a franchise features the fetching Kate Beckinsale as Selene, a leather-clad hunter of Lycan (werewolf) rivals. Her mission is complicated when romance ensues between her and a Lycan named Michael (Scott Speedman). It’s a richly lensed film that’s gorgeous just to stare at, with a cool gadget in a gun that can fire bullets fashioned from daylight, which are lethal to vampires.

I Am Legend

Will Smith is the last man alive in this 2007 reimagining of the classic Richard Matheson novel of the same name. Smith is a lonely scientist in a post-Apocalypse New York who is trying to find a cure for a cancer vaccine that went catastrophically awry, turning humans into zombie/vampire hybrids. It’s an unconventional romance in three ways: there’s a fierce bond between a zombie/vampire couple; Smith’s character is totally devoted to his dog; and there’s more conventional attraction in the arrival of Alice Braga’s character, the last woman alive.



* Peter Howell