Robert Pattinson has a message for the Twilight haters.
“I love that people keep telling me, ‘Man, Twilight ruined the vampire genre,’” the actor, 38, said in an interview with GQ Spain published on Tuesday, January 21. “Are you still stuck on that s––t? How can you be sad about something that happened almost 20 years ago? It’s crazy.”
Pattinson shot to fame for his role as vampire Edward Cullen in The Twilight Saga movies, the first of which hit theaters in 2008. He starred alongside Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner in all five movies in the saga, which grossed over $3 billion worldwide, though critical and fan reaction remains mixed to this day.
Though Twilight gave Pattinson his big break, the franchise could have looked very different, according to filmmaker Catherine Hardwicke, who directed the first film.
During a November 2023 appearance on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast, Hardwicke revealed that movie studio Summit Entertainment didn’t initially think Pattinson was the right choice for Edward.
“They called me back and go, ‘Do you think you can make this guy look good?’” she said of the studio’s reaction to Pattinson’s audition video. “I said, ‘Yeah, I do. Did you see his cheekbones? We’re doing a makeover on the hair and everything and he’s going to start working out and he’s going to be gorgeous.’”
Kristin Stewart in ‘The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1’ Summit Entertainment
Hardwicke then had to convince the execs that Pattinson was the man for the role after he failed to impress them in person.
“They didn’t believe it at first. He walked over there with a stained shirt,” she said. “It was Rob.”
Pattinson, too, struggled with the studio’s direction for the original movie, which he wanted to lean into a more angsty aesthetic. “I wanted to make it as arty as possible,” Pattinson told GQ (per Variety) in February 2022. “We had this strange tension where the studio was scared to make things a little bit too emo and stuff. I thought that was the only way to play it. I spent so much time [on set] infuriated… I can’t believe the way I was acting half the time.”
