Robert Pattinson on new film The Twilight Saga: New Moon
“There’s a high nipple count in this movie,” laughs Robert Pattinson.
“I was terrified because I hadn’t worked out at all and then I saw Taylor and felt incredibly inadequate and emasculated next to him with my prepubescent girl’s A-cups.”
Back in the day when Christopher Lee was swishing about in a big black cape and pointy teeth, it was the heaving bosoms of his virginal victims that were on display.
Fast forward 40 years when the fan base for vampire movie seems to predominantly be teenage girls and women, and it is the men who are required to strip off for the gratuitous body shots.
As a sun-dodging vegetarian vamp (he only drinks animal blood) in the Twilight saga, Pattinson’s Edward Cullen, is understandably pale and somewhat undernourished compared to Taylor Lautner, who plays his romantic rival Jacob Black. The 17-year-old has the overdeveloped abs and pecs of a body builder which were deemed necessary for him to play a lupine shapeshifter.
Lautner’s beefed up role in New Moon, as the best friend and protector of Bella (Kristen Stewart), takes some of the teen heat off Pattinson – or R-Patz as he has become known to the fangirls and celebrity magazines.
The popularity of the saga has become a legitimate phenomenon with the internet filled with Twitterings about its stars, fan websites, forums and fiction. There are even conventions where the Twihards can dress up as their favourite character – right down to the cast that Bella wears on her broken leg when she attends the prom at the end of the first story.
Though the first of the four Twilight novels by Stephanie Meyer has, to date, sold 17 million copies and spent nearlky two years on the New York Times best seller list, Pattinson, who is far more affable than the moody immortal he portrays, admits the film’s frenzied reception still took him by surprise.
“Everyone said ‘Oh you must have known what you were getting into because the books had sold so many’. But it was hard to find someone who had heard of Twilight before the movie came out. I remember looking for the book in London and it was difficult to find.”
