Robert Pattinson

Interview By: Andrea Tuccillo
AndreaTuccillo@TheCinemaSource.com

Robert Pattinson went from being a relative unknown to a pop culture phenomenon in about a year's time. Screaming fans follow him everywhere, young girls ask him to bite them and there are endless blog posts dedicated to the art of his sexily disheveled'and often unwashed'mess of golden brown hair (Something Pattinson himself says he will never quite understand). Oh yeah, and he just made People's Sexiest Men Alive list.

That's what happens when you get cast as Edward Cullen, the intriguing vampire of the hugely popular Twilight book series. Edward is achingly gorgeous and potentially dangerous'a lethal combination when it comes to hormonal teenage girls. Well, ok, not just teenage girls. Edward has become this iconic fantasy for millions of women everywhere, and now Pattinson is too, whether he likes it or not.

So far this 22-year-old Brit has been handling all of the unexpected attention quite well. He shows poise, intelligence and a self-deprecating sense of humor.

'I still haven't really got my head around it,' he says of the Twilight craze, and the public's sudden infatuation with him. 'I've been to so many cities now where everybody screams and stuff and then you leave the room and no one knows who you are and it's like most bizarre dichotomy of existence. It's like I'm living two completely different lives. Maybe it'll be different when the movie comes out but I've been in this Twilight warp for ages, where I haven't really done anything this year other than do the movie and then promote it.'

It wasn't as if Pattinson was looking to get famous. His most notable credit before Twilight was playing the role of Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. But he beat out thousands of contenders for the role of Edward. 'I didn't know what it was when I went into it, at all,' he says. 'I thought it was an independent movie director making a vampire film with an actress [Kristen Stewart] who was on a roll of doing kind of classy indie films, intelligent films. I didn't see it as a teen movie; I thought they were trying to do a teen movie which was different, which was for a different audience. I didn't think it was so huge at all. I just thought it was a teen movie that wasn't pandering to people. I thought it could be kind of clever.'

Twilight, which was filmed on a small budget in Portland, Oregon, has definitely become more than just a tiny vampire movie now. With a built-in fanbase that has been steadily growing, it's an obsession that seems to transcend age. 'Here, since I got back from Oregon, people come up to me every single day and everybody knows,' Pattinson says. 'The other day I was in the airport and the customs lady is like, 'I got my midnight showing tickets!' And it's the customs woman who is like 70, and I was like, ok.' [laughs]

If there's one person in the world who won't be seeing Twilight when it comes out, it's Pattinson. 'If I watch my own stuff I wanna be sick,' he says. 'It is a strange thing. But also the fact that I'm playing a vampire intrinsically it's kind of a bad boy type of thing. I don't feel like I need to live up to anything and I think everything I do can play in my favor, like the more badly I behave the more, I guess, attractive the character becomes.'

And as if he wasn't attractive enough already, Pattinson is also a talented musician, who plays both guitar and piano, and sings (he's got a Van Morrison-ish vibe). He even got two of his own songs onto the Twilight soundtrack, but he's quick to downplay being a double threat.

'I was doing music last year and I think [co-star] Nikki Reed gave a CD to [director] Catherine Hardwicke and then Catherine called me and said, 'Hey, look at this' and she showed the scenes with these two random songs, which were just recorded on my computer, and it kind of bizarrely fit,' he says. 'I didn't really think about it. The hype wasn't even as much, it was just when she started editing. I didn't know it was gonna be on the soundtrack or anything, so it was just like, 'Ok, I agreed to it then.' Now it's become this big deal and it looks like I'm trying to get a record contract and I'm like 'Oh no!' They were just songs written years ago, nothing to do with Twilight. I thought I'd be able to get away with it secretly and have it under a different name and stuff.'

The multi-talented Pattinson does have at least one thing he isn't very good at: baseball. There's a baseball scene in the movie that was particularly hard for Pattinson to shoot. 'I'm terrible at baseball, yeah,' he admits. 'And Catherine wanted me so desperately to look like a pro-baseball player for some reason and I was just like, why' He's not a pro-baseball player, he's a vampire! I just didn't understand it so I kept fighting everyone the whole time. I was like he can be crap, he doesn't even need to be able to play, he doesn't even the need the rules, he doesn't even need a bat! So I kept arguing and arguing and everybody found it really annoying 'cause I wouldn't do 'ready position.' I had a coach teach me how to do a ready position and I was like, it's a squat! Stop calling it a ready position! So every time Catherine had a problem with blocking at any point during the rest of the shoot I'd be like 'I really think doing a ready position would help this scene.''

He's not afraid to make his opinion known on set, something he learned from his next film due out after Twilight. It's called Little Ashes and he actually filmed it before Twilight. He plays famed artist Salvador Dali. 'I realized how much power an actor has in changing the actual story of the film when normally you feel like just a cog and you're supposed to get to your mark and you're just a puppet,' Pattinson says. 'I realized if you fight enough for what you think the story is then it will start to form how you want it to form.'

He adds, 'The whole point of being an actor is you've got to bring stuff to the table otherwise it's a boring stupid job if you don't.'

Pattinson knows it's not just about screaming fans and landing yourself on the cover of magazines, and that's why he'll be dazzling us long after Twilight fades.