Between 2008 and 2012, Robert Pattinson made millions of teen hearts glow as the ice-cold vampire Edward Cullen in the five films of the Twilight saga. The film series that began with Twilight ended up grossing over $3.4 billion at the box office.
The studio behind the film adaptation of Stephanie Meyer’s fantasy novels initially had concerns about Pattinson’s casting.
Was Robert Pattinson not pretty enough for Twilight?
Director Catherine Hardwicke recently revealed this in an episode of Josh Horowitz’s podcast Happy Sad Confused, in which, among other things, she looks back on the casting process for the first Twilight film.
Before the Twilight films, Robert Pattinson was primarily known for playing Hogwarts student Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. During auditions with Kristen Stewart in Hardwicke’s private home in Los Angeles, he was able to convince the director.
Summit Entertainment
Bella and Edward in Twilight
But the financing film studio Summit Entertainment had after viewing the test recordings, concernsthat Pattinson wasn’t attractive enough for fantasy heartthrob Edward Cullen:
They called me back and said, ‘Can you make this guy look good?’. And I said, ‘Sure, I can. Have you seen those cheekbones? We do a makeover for the hair and everything else, and he will start training and he will be beautiful.’
Why didn’t the Twilight studio think he was pretty enough? At the time, Robert Pattinson did not fit the embodiment of a timelessly beautiful vampire, as he himself said in an interview with Allure in 2020:
I had dyed my hair black, but I still had an inch and a half of hairline, and I had depilated my body. For months I had been drinking beer all day long so I had this hairless, chubby body. I looked like a baby in a wig.
In the end, Pattinson was able to prevail against three other favorites who almost played the vampire Edward: Ben Barnes, Shiloh Fernandez and Jackson Rathbone.
Shiloh Fernandez was cast by Catherine Hardwicke in the fantasy film Red Riding Hood some time later in 2011. Rathbone didn’t go away empty-handed either. He landed the role of vampire Jasper Hale and appeared in all five Twilight films.
What’s next for the Twilight franchise?
The five Twilight films were extremely successful and are still very popular today. However, the franchise has been dormant since the release of Twilight 4: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 in 2012. This is about to change soon.
We have known since April 2023 that the Lionsgate studio is working on one Twilight reboot in the form of a series is working. The aim is to film the book series with new actors. However, the project is still at an early stage of development. So it could be a few years before we find out who Robert Pattinson’s Edward successor will be.
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