Just a year ago, Robert Pattinson was a good-looking young man with a Harry Potter film under his belt and big dreams. Now he is becoming a cult hero, the sexy vampire in the second installment of the Twilight series, New Moon, and a great many of his dreams are coming true.
He recently chatted about reprising his role of Edward Cullen that has attracted thousands of female fans and thrust him into the worldwide spotlight. While he tries to keep things the same, he knows he cannot turn back the clock.
The reluctant, fresh-faced, 22-year-old Pattinson still prefers his home in London, his pub chums and his family to the bright lights and big city of Los Angeles. But he is learning to deal with his newfound fame and coming to terms with his sudden stardom. He has found good friends in his co-stars, especially his leading lady Bella played by Kristen Stewart.
In addition to working on the third sequel of the Twilight series, Eclipse, scheduled for release next year, Pattinson also had lead roles in the feature films Little Ashes, in which he portrays renowned artist Salvador Dali, and How to Be, a British comedy in which he plays a struggling musician in London.
When he’s not busy acting, you can find him playing the piano or guitar and composing his own music. One of his songs, “Never Think,” which he co-wrote with Sam Bradley, was included on the Twilight soundtrack. He also performed three original songs on the soundtrack for How to Be, written by composer Joe Hastings. “Music is my backup plan, if acting fails,” he says.
No matter what he chooses to do in the future, chances are his star will continue to rise.

Talk a bit about how your life has changed since Twilight was released last summer.
Robert Pattinson: I’d like to think that I haven’t changed that much. Within myself, I don’t think I’ve changed. It’s kind of extraordinary. I don’t think that any of us expected any of this to happen. The magnitude of this franchise seems to keep building and building.

What would say have been the highs and the lows of this whole experience?
Robert Pattinson: I don’t know. I think it’s still so young, to me. I can’t claim anything to be a low. I pretty much live an almost identical life, apart from being recognized. That’s not exactly the worst thing in the world!

What was it like working with a new director this time around? Was there a new vibe on the set?
Robert Pattinson: It wasn’t just the director that made this one different. It was so different, as well, because we kind of knew what type of animal that we were dealing with. [Mine] was much more of a supporting role, in this one. I started three weeks after they started shooting and I did a lot of my first scenes doing the apparition scenes. It was actually one of the most relaxing jobs that I’ve ever done. Chris [Weitz, the film’s director] has a really peaceful presence and I got on really well with him. I pretty much had a stress-free job for three months. It was great for me. All the pressure was on Taylor [Lautner].

Do you have a favorite scene from this film that stands out as your favorite one to shoot?
Robert Pattinson: I think the break-up scene with Bella was my favorite. Hopefully, it will come off as having quite a few more levels than the relationship in Twilight. It was interesting. It was a five-page dialogue scene. That didn’t happen at all in the first one, and it’s quite an interesting little moment. It completely bypasses all the supernatural elements of the story as well.

Why do you think people embrace these stories? Is it the themes, the characters, the subject, the darkness, the romance? Why do you think teenagers are so attracted to the vampire theme?
Robert Pattinson: The problem is, when I looked at it, I never looked at it as a vampire story, right from the beginning. When I try to play it, I try to eliminate the vampire element, as much as I can, and just see it as a tool to make their relationship a little more fraught. Right after the audition, I found myself bizarrely invested in the story and I hadn’t even read the books, at that point. I’ve gotten more and more attached to it. I’ve been talking about the script for Eclipse to people, over the last few weeks, and I find myself getting very argumentative, which I’m not usually. They definitely have some kind of power.

Can you talk about why these books speak to the readers and why your character, Edward, is so popular with the fans?
Robert Pattinson: I’m not entirely sure. I asked some female fans a while ago why are you so attracted to Edward. The completely unanimous response was, ‘Because he is so sexy.” I was kind of baffled by the whole thing. In some ways it must also be about being chivalrous and gentlemanly. Teenage girls are still obsessed with Mr. Darcy in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. It doesn’t go away. It’s still a male ideal and Edward is all of them rolled into one. I guess that’s why.

How physical is the role?
Robert Pattinson: A lot of the physicality was quite difficult because I’m not that much of a body actor. I don’t have that much control over my body and you had to establish a whole matrix of movement so it didn’t look human, so I guess that was quite difficult. We went through a lot of stuff about physicality and ended up making it much more simple than complicated. Where we started out with really complex ideas about how they should move and fight and everything. And ended up playing them much more human than we initially started out doing. I think it’s better; it’s scarier. The emotional arc in a lot of ways felt very natural.

Do you consider yourself a romantic like Edward, in the classical old school sense?
Robert Pattinson: I think he decides to be with Bella because he hasn’t talked to anyone in such a long time, he hasn’t made any effort with anybody. When he finally starts a relationship it has to be through this template, a formal template of what he believes to be the correct way of dealing with other humans. I think his actual core is quite similar to me.

Were you familiar with the Twilight series before you took this life-changing role?
Robert Pattinson: No. I read the books afterward and established the whole way of playing it. I found out about the whole cult about Twilight after the audition. I liked the idea of going into a project that the audience will have a very hard preconception of what they are seeing, and there is a lot of back-story set up for you and you can play against it within the movie.

There is intense sexual tension in these books between Edward and Bella. Do you have a trick to build up that kind of connection on screen or was there a connection between you and Kristen, the actress who played Bella?
Robert Pattinson: There was definitely some kind of connection. I don’t know if it was sexual tension, but we never really talked to each other on the set. There were a lot of awkward silences on the set. Neither of us knew one another the whole time and I think that helped. I went to Oregon two months earlier and obsessed myself with the story, so when everyone else came up they were like, ‘Oh, my God what is this guy on?’

How was your portrayal different from what you saw in the books?
Robert Pattinson: I liked the idea of him being a little less in control of himself. It makes him sexier and I think it makes him more attractive if he’s saying, ‘there is a very real chance that I might kill you if I’m around you.’ It makes the relationship more intense if she’s saying, ‘I know you won’t as a kind of reassurance to herself.’ I thought I made him a little more unpredictable.

Which of the novels resonates the most for you, as a reader or as an actor, and which are you most enthused about working in?
Robert Pattinson: I think that New Moon was my favorite book as well, mainly because I like the juxtaposition. It’s really funny how everyone looks at Edward as the hero, since he’s continuously saved by the damsel in distress. In the fight sequence at the end, Bella ends up saving Edward, as she does in every single one of the books. I think he really realizes that in New Moon.

What do you have planned for the future?
Robert Pattinson: I had been playing a string of loner parts for a while and this is the king of the loner parts for me. Hopefully, I am going to go into a thing where you actually have some normal relationship with the rest of humanity. I think I have literally played every single role, which has some sort of derangement. I hope the next thing I do I can be relatively normal.