Surviving the Vampire

Sunday, March 21, 2010

El País: Surviving the Vampire

Fame has made him live hiding and to go out only at night. Like his character in Twilight. Robert Pattinson detoxes himself briefly with Remember Me.

Robert Pattinson assures us that he has found the way to go unnoticed: grow a beard. “It works, the other day, in a bar, a guy told me that I looked like the guy from Twilight. That I had to go see the movie”, he explains. It pains us to tell him that is not so. He is wearing a baseball hat and a blondish beard. An antipaparazzi classic uniform that will hardly make him invisible. This 23 years old Londoner has had to digest fame very quickly. A few years back he lived out of the royalties from his small role as Cedric Diggory, the handsome guy of Hogwarts, in 2 of the Harry Potter films. He was a guy from an expensive school, with a stable family, that used to hang out in pubs and played the guitar. He was about to stop acting when he was called for a casting in LA for the highly anticipated adaptation to Stephanie Meyer’s vampire saga.

Five thousand candidates aspired to be the irresistible bloodsucker Edward Cullen. The director, Catherine Hardwicke did not choose any of those: “I saw so many handsome guys. That was the problem. They all looked like the typical cute guys from school. None of them gave me the impression of coming from another time or era” declared Hardwicke.

Pattinson had not read Twilight and had no idea about the cult surrounding the books. He bought a plane ticket from his own pocket money and slept at his agent's. He took a Valium before the casting, but something connected between him and the already hired Kristen Stewart. “When they met, we felt a very strong chemistry. All electricity” said Hardwicke. Pattinson got the part. He had no clue of what was coming to him.

Overnight, he started to be followed by screaming women, harassed by photographers, immersed in real stampedes. He had to learn to live locked in hotels and to go out only at night. Ironically, playing a vampire made him live like one: "I never thought of this before, but it’s true. It’s incredible the hysteria and exaggeration that can develop", he assures us with his eyes wide open, like is he is seeing indescribable horrors.

The particularity of the Pattinson effect is his reach across generations. To the predictable teenager followers, groups of united adult women, called the Twilight Moms have joined; thanks to Edward and Bella (the lovers that Pattinson and the mortal Stewart play) they are replaying their fantasies and “hotness” from puberty. Even the older professionals cannot resist: Camilla Long, a sour reporter from the newspaper The Times, announced excitedly in Twitter that she managed to steal a kiss from the actor during a recent interview.

“The craziest ones are the twenty somethings, the ones that still think they are teenagers”, explains the actor between laughs. He corrects himself immediately: "Actually, there are very few that are crazy. I’ve had very few bad experiences. They are only girls that camp out for several days in order to have a social life. For them I am something like an excuse. It’s people that come from far away towns and travel to the big city for the first time”. He pronounces “people” like he is talking about extra terrestrial creatures. “They feel secure because they are surrounding themselves with people with the same likes”.

But sudden notoriety also brings positive consequences. Twilight has made him one of the best payed professional actors in the movies. According to the list from Vanity Fair, in 2009 he made 18 million dollars, what puts him 2 spots above Brad Pitt in earnings in Hollywood. And according to Anna Kendrick (who managed to morph from the virginal friend of Bella from Twilight to a flaming Oscar nomination for "Up in the Air"), the Brit is the only actor that can make George Clooney jealous.

In person, Pattinson is a well educated twenty something with a nervous laugh, still ashamed of being the center of attention. He tends to define many things like “weird” and like a good Brit, self promotion and fuss embarrass him. There has been plenty written about his phobia to shower, but on this occasion he has a fresh look and smells clean.

He introduces his most recent work, Remember Me, a romantic drama that takes place in New York before September 11. He plays a boy that is very tortured with his past and that falls in love with a student from his same college ( Emilie de Ravin, the first time mom from Lost). He will soon discover that they share similar tragedies. He chose the project because of its reality: " I accepted the role before Twilight. I knew that I had to do several films from the fantastic saga and I liked the idea of a character and a story so real. Watching it is like watching a piece of the life of a family".

Remember Me won't be the title that will show a new facet of Pattinson. The actor has spent the last 113 minutes of the film polishing the expression of existential anguish similar to the one that the sensitive Edward the vampire has. And smoking like a truck driver."The fact that a the lead character smokes is unusual. But was is most unusual is that that is the most polemic issue of the film. To me, it’s a detail that makes him more real. Most twenty something smoke". Pattinson admits that he too is a smoker.

In Remember Me, finally there is sex with the leading lady. But, it’s not very probable that these scenes will make the ladies spectators as excited as the moments of not consumed passion in Twilight. Pattinson didn’t feel a difference: “To me, it’s very similar. You have to show the same emotions. When you really love someone and you go to bed with them, you always want to give more than sex”. In the corner, his manager coughs: a coincidence or a well placed censor cough?

His first sexual encounter – in film- took place in Little Ashes, a production filmed in Spain that depicts the relationship between Dali and Lorca. In the film, Pattinson, before being a vampire, played the surrealist painter and said that the sexual scenes, "filmed on an open set with Spanish electricians laughing to themselves", were uncomfortable. He also shared that the budget was so small that the actors had no trailers. Explanations were asked and apologies were given.

In the world of Robert Pattinson, where everything is taken out of context and the most inane things become exclusives, it’s useful to learn the art of saying something without saying anything and explaining without getting wet. In spite of the absence of scandals in his short life, and that even you can qualify it as boring, the liars manage to produce a constant dripping of news.

The most persistent one being that he is having a torrid affair with his Twilight co-star, Kristen Stewart. The director contributed to the speculations by declaring to Time that she had told Pattinson not to get involved with Stewart, who was a minor then. “I did not want responsibilities for something that ended up happening”.

But maybe, his next movie will give some variety to his headlines. He is filmimg with Uma Thurman Bel Ami, and adaptation of the novel by Guy de Maupassant. "I had never read french literature and now I am very interested. It’s incredible that a novel from 1885 is still modern".

Pattinson will play Georges Duroy, a seducer without any morals that climbs the Parisian high society. He is excited to be the bad guy. "It’s a very dark comedy, one you don’t find regularly. To me it’s a very funny story. Even though everyone will probably not find what’s funny."

He has signed a contract for 4 Twilight movies. The third one, Eclipse, will premiere June 30th, and it’s rumored that the last book, Breaking Dawn, will be split into two films. If it extends too long, Pattinson may be stuck with the 17yr old vampire. Wouldn’t you want a change, study, do something else? “Maybe…” says him with the tone of voice of someone that gets overwhelmed with decision making. “I don’t know if I’ll want to act all my life”.

Translation by Carolamex
Some edits on spelling and grammar by CandeeCarol