14 DAY TRIAL // Even when “The Twilight Saga” was far from over, it was still a delight to hear leading man Robert Pattison (aka “vegetarian” virgin vampire Edward Cullen) give his 2 cents about it because he never really held back. He has absolutely no reason to do so now, which only makes his answers on the topic all that much more interesting.
Pattinson has a new movie coming out now, “The Rover,” which also stars Guy Pearce and promises to be unlike anything else he’s done before. Initial hype around the project has materialized in comparisons to the original “Mad Max,” only set in Australia.
Either way, he’s probably learned to expect “Twilight” questions no matter what project he’s pushing, and his chat with the Daily Beast is no different. Apparently, Pattinson got so much “sparkly criticisms” during the years he played Edward he actually grew sick of them.
In case you don’t know, Edward Cullen isn’t just “vegetarian” (that is to say, he doesn’t feed on human but on animal blood) or virgin or 107 years old and looking permanently 17: direct sunlight doesn’t kill him like it does to other vampires, but turns his skin sparkly.
“The Vampires are physically similar enough to their human origins to pass as humans under some circumstances (like cloudy days). There are many basic differences. They appear to have skin like ours, albeit very fair skin. The skin serves the same general purpose of protecting the body. However, the cells that make up their skin are not pliant like our cells, they are hard and reflective like crystal,” Stephenie Meyers, who penned the original series of novels on which the movies were based, says.
So, when you put Edward in direct sunlight, you get something like in the photo above, which is actually a screenshot from the film. Because of this, Pattinson was dubbed online Sparkles; another very popular nickname was RPatz.
Apparently, he hates them both.
“In a lot of ways, people have decided what Twilight is about before they’ve even thought about it, and then they’ve labeled us, the actors, as part of whatever that may be. Even the sparkling thing. I get so many sparkly criticisms!” he says in this new interview.
“But I don’t actually remember a moment of in any of the movies where I sparkle. Maybe one second in the first one. It’s like, really? All these fanboys are like, ‘You’re sparkling!’ And I’m like, ‘Really? You must have freeze framed that one second.’ It’s just the idea of sparkling – people lost their minds over it,” he continues.
We’re pretty sure the sparkly thing happens at least a couple of times: once in the first movie, when he shows it to Bella for the first time, and once in the second, when he’s trying to commit “suicide” by exposing himself to the world as a vampire. It could also happen in the last one, but we’re not betting money on it.
In the same interview, Pattinson also talks about the backlash “Twilight” got and how he never really understood it. He’s referring to the criticism that the story of Edward and Bella was actually an abusive one, in which Bella was supposed to forgo her individuality to become Mrs. Cullen.
“People saying, ‘Oh, it’s a bad example for women.’ Blah, blah, blah. As if we were all a bunch of dumba[expletive]s. We’re not playing it that way! That’s purely your interpretation! We’re not trying to make a movie about subservient female characters at all,” Pattinson says. Clearly, he feels very strongly on the issue.