Robert Pattinson was the lead of one of the biggest blockbuster franchises of the early 2000s, Twilight. Young girls loved the books and saw Pattinson as the perfect live-action version of the novel’s hero, Edward Cullen, a 100 plus-year-old vampire trapped in a high schooler’s body who was in love with a human teen while being consumed by thoughts of drinking her blood and fending off the advances of her other, werewolf suitor.
It was a strange tale, to say the least, and during Variety’s Actors on Actors interview with Jennifer Lopez, Pattinson shared his own thoughts on the weirdness of the whole thing, saying:
It’s a weird story, Twilight. It’s not just like – it’s strange how people responded a lot to it. I guess the books are very romantic, but at the same time, it’s not like ‘The Notebook’ romantic. ‘The Notebook’ is very sweet and heartbreaking, but Twilight is about this guy, and he finds the one girl he wants to be with, and he also wants to eat her. I mean, not eat her, but drink her blood or whatever. It’s not that other people are telling them they can’t be together, it’s his own body telling him that.
While Pattinson’s apparent disdain for the narrative of the series might upset hardcore fans, it’s actually far from the first time that the actor has expressed such views. Even while the films were still in theaters, Pattinson was notorious for being less than kind towards the series, having once famously said, in response to a question about what special thing he would be taking away from the set of the final Twilight movie, “my dignity.”
While many see this as a less-than-grateful attitude towards the films and fandom that made him a star, Pattinson’s career after the franchise, where he’s dabbled almost exclusively in smaller, gritty, performance-driven dramas about real-life issues shows he was never interested in the kind of Matinee-idol career bequeathed to him by Twilight. The actor genuinely seems to have a preference for realistic stories driven by believable human motivations and psychology, all of which were in short supply in Stephenie Meyer’s tale of vampires and werewolves fighting over a human girl.
With his new lead role in Matt Reeves’ Batman trilogy though, Pattinson seems all set once again to take on another blockbuster franchise. Let’s just hope he has a better relationship with the Dark Knight’s legacy and its rabid fandom.
