'I get a lot of crying from teenage girls, but lately a lot of them actually want me to bite them, which is a bit worrying,' says Twilight actor Robert Pattinson If you ask Piers Morgan about Robert Pattinson, he'll tell you he's Britain's fastest rising star. If you ask any teenage girl, she'll scream. If you ask him, he'll say - with complete honesty - he doesn't know what all the fuss is about...
The noise is deafening; a mounting, high-pitched wall of sound that resonates like a fire alarm. Hundreds of teenage girls are packed outside Covent Garden’s Royal Opera House for the Baftas, voicing their appreciation for the star of the Twilight films, and it sounds like Beatlemania, Nineties-era Girl Power and the X Factor crowd combined.
Screaming fans are commonplace here on the red carpet, but this crowd has a more deranged, more despairing edge to it.
The man at the centre of the maelstrom is Robert Pattinson, who plays Edward Cullen, the Byronesque, deathly-cool vampire hero of the gigantically successful franchise based on the best-selling novels by Stephenie Meyer. When I meet him later, he says he was overwhelmed by the swell of adulation.
‘I really didn’t know anything about all this Twilight madness, even when I was shooting the original movie,’ says the 23-year-old.
‘But when we came back to LA to do reshoots there were 500 fans at the set, with girls screaming and people asking for my autograph. I get a lot of crying from teenage girls, but lately a lot of them actually want me to bite them, which is a bit worrying.
'Another girl started undressing in front of me in the street. To get my attention she’d asked me what she could do, so as a joke I said, “Take all your clothes off.” But then she actually started taking her clothes off right there! Some people are really desperate.’
It sounds as worrying, I suggest, as when two participants at a charity auction in Cannes last year bid nearly £40,000 between them to buy their two daughters a single kiss each on the cheek from Pattinson.
‘One day I was a normal bloke and then the next I wasn’t,’ he mutters, shuffling uncomfortably in his seat. ‘The day before the Harry Potter London premiere I was just sitting in Leicester Square, happily being ignored by everyone. Then suddenly strangers are screaming my name. It’s just madness now.
More than just co-stars? The actor with Kristen Stewart in TwilightMadness it may be, but Pattinson is the hottest young male star in Britain today. He first came to national attention in Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, in which he played Cedric Diggory (he reprised the role in The Order Of The Phoenix); with Twilight, he graduated from wizard to vampire, and the franchise – and his fame – will surely run and run.
It’s why Live columnist Piers Morgan puts him at No 6 in his list of the Top 100 Celebrities.
Morgan says, ‘As the handsome young star of the Twilight films, Pattinson is beloved of teenage girls and other moody types. That fact makes him a nailed-down cert to be the most sought-after British movie star of 2010. And that, in turn, makes him matter.’
He wasn’t, however, ready for any of this. His mother Clare, a model-agency booker, and father Richard, a vintage-car dealer, sent him to private schools near their home in Barnes, south-west London – Tower House prep and then Harrodian.
He played the piano and classical guitar, watched Arsenal and had no interest in acting. ‘Up until I was 12 my sisters used to try to dress me up as a girl and introduce me as “Claudia”, which I really didn’t like.
‘Twelve was a turning point, as I moved to a mixed school and then I became cool and discovered hair gel. One day, my dad and I were at a restaurant and I noticed this group of pretty girls nearby, so for some reason I asked where they’d just been.
'They said the local acting school in Barnes and from then on my dad nagged me to attend. He even said he’d pay me to go, which actually I thought pretty strange. I don’t know what his intentions were. But I went anyway.
‘For me it was an avenue worth exploring. I was one of those guys who just couldn’t be bothered to do my homework, yet who, according to the teachers, had great potential, but was too lazy to realise it. I wasn’t at all focused on school, and I didn’t achieve much.’
Leading man: Pattinson with Stewart (left) and actress Emilie de Ravin who he stars with in his latest movie Remember MeDespite his lack of enthusiasm in the classroom, he was all set to continue his studies until Harry Potter came calling. ‘I was going to do the conventional thing and go to university to study international relations,’ he says. ‘I wanted to be a politician, but Harry Potter made that decision for me.’
New Moon (the sequel to 2008’s Twilight) has taken £470 million worldwide. It broke the opening-day record in the US, cementing Pattinson’s movie-star status, but he’s still unused to talking about himself.
‘During interviews I’m incredibly nervous,’ he says. ‘I don’t want there to be a silence, because I’ll start crying out of nervousness. I just say the first thing that comes into my head. But the only way to establish any kind of mystique is to completely shut up and never talk to anyone. Unfortunately, I have to. It’s in my contract.’
He’s dressed in scruffy jeans and battered trainers and looks like he hasn’t combed his signature big hair in weeks; he has thick, dark eyebrows and heavy stubble that fails to cloak his chiselled jaw. It’s as if he’s trying to distance himself from his poster-boy image, shying away from the spotlight.
At over 6ft tall and with a flawlessly pale complexion, Pattinson reminds me of a droll, rather elongated James Dean – which is not entirely coincidental.
‘I don’t think a lot of actors really pay attention to him, but I’ve always been very impressed by James Dean. A lot of great actors in the past have tried to imitate him. I have a DVD of his earlier TV movies, and you can see how he’s trying to move his body in an almost balletic way and then trying to be still and then almost operatic.
‘At first I didn’t want to do a movie like Twilight,’ he declares. ‘I specifically hadn’t done anything that anyone would see since Harry Potter, because I wanted to teach myself how to act. I didn’t want to be an idiot. I was going to wait for another year to do two or three more little things and then do something bigger.
Twilight came kind of randomly. It was a chance and, as I didn’t have a reputation at all, there was nothing for me to lose.’
He only attended the Twilight audition to appease his agent, who insisted on putting him up for the part against his better wishes.
Twilight hysteria: Fans scream as Pattinson arrives at the premiere of The Twilight Saga: New Moon l‘They actually asked me to take my shirt off at the audition,’ he says. ‘I thought, if that’s the criteria, then you’ve got the wrong guy. I knew about the audition five months beforehand, but I didn’t want to bother getting a six-pack or doing much else at all in preparation – but looking back, I might have combed my hair. I thought that I had to be this bland guy with his shirt off who people just project ideas onto. At first I thought to play Edward in an interesting way was totally impossible.
‘There was a lot of debate about the make-up I wore in the film, as at first it looked ridiculous, because I’m already quite pale with dark eyebrows. I didn’t even think of make-up when I got the part, and I wasn’t too involved in any of the decisions. I was more of a victim.’
Pattinson admits that while he liked his character in the first instalment of Twilight, it was only in New Moon that he really warmed to the role. ‘I understood Edward much more in the second one than in the first. New Moon is about his being compelled to do the wrong thing, and I understand that a lot – especially when it comes to relationships.
‘Edward makes a mistake in New Moon that’s acknowledged by everybody, including himself. He’s totally undermined physically and emotionally and so is much more humanised. In the first one, he’s still an idealistic character from beginning to end.
'In New Moon, he’s more the hero of the story who refuses to accept that he’s the hero. I think that’s kind of admirable. Once you’re immune to failure, nothing matters. I saw that after being the hot thing for a few months after Harry Potter; it calms down until no one cares. It helps knowing that pretty soon, no one will care.’
Like many actors, Pattinson finds it very difficult to watch the movies he makes. He didn’t even make it through the premiere of Twilight. ‘I took my mother and squirmed through the first ten minutes,’ he recalls. ‘But in the end I couldn’t bear it, so I had to leave and went out and sat in the car. I hate watching myself
on screen, because I’m constantly worried that I’ll look like a fraud. Even before I started acting, I was constantly thinking I was faking my emotions. I remember when I was a teenager thinking my girlfriend was
cheating on me, and going around riling myself up, pretending to cry. It was totally illegitimate – I actually didn’t feel anything.’
He’s anxious not to get typecast in ‘pretty-boy, posh-public-schoolboy roles’ and to that end he’s taken some diverse parts, including Salvador Dalí in Little Ashes. ‘It was a decisive moment for me. It’s the first part I’ve had that has required really significant thought, and during filming I became completely preoccupied with Dalí and read every biography I could find. He was the most complex, bizarre man, but eventually I could relate to him. I took the part, but the job became really tough.
I had to do a lot of naked work. But, as I doubted I’d ever get another acting job again, I thought, “Why not try to do something different?”’
There’s been intense speculation about the nature of his relationship with Twilight co-star Kristen Stewart, but during our meeting, he insists they’re not an item.
‘It’s ridiculous. If I even casually talk to a girl it’s printed that I’m going out with her. I was supposed to be dating this Brazilian model [Annelyse Schoenberger] and I’ve never even met her. There’s literally not a single story that could be written about me – I never do anything.
'I don’t see people. I’m always working. I don’t even have people’s phone numbers. And honestly, I almost don’t want a girlfriend, not in this environment. Not a single person calls me. Not long ago, I turned on my British mobile phone in LA for the first time in six months and had two missed calls. They were from two giggling teenage girls asking to speak with Edward.’
A few days later, though, Pattinson finally owns up to one of Hollywood’s worst-kept secrets – that he and Stewart are a couple who have hidden their relationship to avoid further attention from the paparazzi. ‘It’s extremely difficult, but we are together.’
He is reported to command £7 million per film for his Twilight appearances – money that seems to be wasted on him, as he’s yet to develop a taste for the high life. ‘I haven’t got a lot of use for the money I’ve earned,’ he says with a shrug.
‘If you want to go out to dinner you can go to certain places, and I guess that’s kind of handy. But apart from that it hasn’t really affected me. I like food that’s really bad for you. My body craves it. I don’t really have any particular desires.
'I never buy anything; I mean literally never – I don’t like buying clothes, I don’t like watches, I don’t like holidays. I like cheap old cars – I bought a car for £1,000. So all this money I’ve made doesn’t really affect me. I’ve always preferred being broke, because it gives you a certain energy.’
And what happens when the Twilight trilogy is over? ‘I don’t know. It scares me a little. Sometimes when I go to meetings for other projects, people only seem interested in the union of Edward Cullen and me. But if the role interests me and it can bring the public from Twilight into the cinema, then we’ve cracked it.’
Brosnan, and he’s currently in the middle of shooting Bel Ami opposite Uma Thurman. Also in his calendar is Unbound Captives, in which he’ll play a white American boy kidnapped and brought up by Comanches, alongside Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. Filming is set to start in the spring.
And, of course, there’s the third film in the Twilight series, Eclipse, scheduled for release on July 9.
Reprising their roles as Cullen and Bella Swan, Pattinson and Stewart will continue their supernatural romance, caught between the vampires, werewolves and humans of small-town Washington State.
The fourth and final instalment of the series, Breaking Dawn, may be divided, Harry Potter-style, into two separate movies; filming is expected to start in the autumn.
‘I know I’m the luckiest guy on Earth, but I’m not massively concerned about doing lots of acting jobs,’ he concludes. ‘If it all just went away, right now, I’d think, “All right. I don’t really care.” That’s probably a daft thing to say.
'But I think it’d be much worse to do a load of stuff that’s really awful. Because then you can’t go into another career. If you’ve made a fool out of yourself, if you’re a joke actor, then you’re never going to be taken seriously. The only thing I want from anything is to not be embarrassed.’
‘New Moon’ is out on DVD on March 22
source: dailymail
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