I was a teenage vampire

British actor Robert Pattinson's break-out role in 'Twilight' has girls swooning - and the movie hasn't even opened yet

By Lynda Gorov
Globe Correspondent / November 16, 2008
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LOS ANGELES -There's no ignoring those lips, and Robert Pattinson is the first to admit it. They're red, almost blood red, and they took a lot of lipstick to create. Pattinson is not proud.

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It wasn't as bad as having his naturally luxurious eyebrows plucked into submission for "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." ("At first I said, 'No way, that's for girls,' " he said. "But I let them.") Though it wasn't easy, either. The lipstick was piled on so thick that no amount of wiping could erase it entirely at the end of the workday.

Still, a basically unknown actor has to do what he has to do. In the case of playing the lead vampire in the widely anticipated "Twilight," which opens Friday, that meant having a lot of white makeup airbrushed on and lipstick applied regularly. Pattinson doesn't know the exact shade. (In real life his lips are plump but a tad pale.)

"I know, it's so embarrassing; it's really embarrassing," said Pattinson, laughing, as he often does, at the incongruity of his life now. "I don't know, I never understood why I had lipstick on. I never understood a lot of things. I think I looked a little bit too dead."

Still, the 22-year-old Pattinson's career may be about to come to life in a major way. Advance ticket sales for "Twilight," based on Stephenie Meyer's mega-selling novel for young adults, are enor mous. Teenage girls can't wait. And what they want is the face on the poster - the pouty pretty boy with the oddly glowing gold eyes.

In "Twilight," Pattinson plays Edward Cullen, part of an immortal family of bloodsuckers living in Forks, Wash., where the constant cloud cover allows them to move about freely in the daylight that would otherwise cause them to glisten like gold. But these vampires are civilized. They gorge on animal blood instead of their neighbors', which is kind but never quite sates them. Of course there's a love interest for Pattinson, a girl named Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart from "Into the Wild") who moves to Washington and enrolls at the same high school. She's actually the main character, and the one girls everywhere have related to in making "Twilight" the book a smash.

The novel intimidated Pattinson. In no uncertain terms, it describes his character as a physical god: not quite human, almost superhuman. Six-pack abs are a given. He's not just handsome, he's heartbreakingly so. Mostly he was not how Pattinson imagined himself at the time of his audition, when he described himself as relatively fat after a year of focusing on his music (piano, guitar, performing around London with a buddy).

More often than not, Pattinson has been cast as the geek rather than the guy who gets the girl. As a model from ages 12 to 15, he says he couldn't book a job. While he was in one of the Harry Potter movies - wizard-in-training Cedric Diggory in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" (2007) - he was, he says, in it "for about five seconds." Source