Robert Pattinson talks Breaking Dawn
Want to know the tooth about
Robert Pattinson? It seems the English lad, who plays celebrated vampire Edward Cullen in the
Twilight movies, is just as hung up about sex scenes as Twi-hards are.
We’ve all been wondering how the consummation of Edward and Bella’s (
Kristen Stewart) relationship unfolds in
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1.
In this interview, the 25-year-old hopes the scenes give fans what they want. And he reveals we’ll see something more than simply a lot of feathers. Fang goodness for that!
You’ve finished filming the final two Twilight movies. Are you sad that it’s all over?
I feel like I’ve been in a whirlwind for so long that I don’t really know. I feel like I’ve been doing it for years constantly, even though I’ve done other movies in between. Whenever you promote or talk about another movie, you’re always talking about
Twilight, so it’s kind of constant.
Tell us about your final day on the set.
The last day in Canada was semi-miserable. We did two weeks of night shoots, and it was freezing cold and horrible. But the actual last day, which was in St Thomas in the Caribbean, was pretty amazing. The one time we had to shoot in nice weather, it was the last day of the shoot and we were shooting on the beach and were just making out in the sea all night. So I was like, “That was not too bad!” It was a nice little send-off.
Was it a big party? Or more of a funeral?
The very last day was nice. In the Caribbean, it was just me and Kristen. We’d done everything, we hardly had anything to shoot. It was just a couple of extra bits and so it was really nice and everybody just stayed and watched the sunrise. It was really beautiful.
Do you look forward to the hype all being over and you can get back to doing other things?
Yeah, but it’s always a good thing to have a bit of hype, especially nowadays. I’ll be interested to see how people perceive me in a couple of years, because it seems as though people have been talking about the same stuff about me for about three years now. So I’m wondering how long that will go on for. But I don’t really know how to predict anything.
What kind of scripts are you getting offered now?
I’m kind of in the same position. I guess the good thing is, because
Twilight is so specific and Edward is such a specific character, that you can’t really get typecast – there are only so many parts that are benevolent vampires. If you’re an action hero or something like that, everyone will say you’re doing the same movie if you ever do an action movie again. But I just don’t have to do a benevolent vampire movie again, or vampire love story.
In The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1, Edward and Bella become parents. How did you prepare for that? Was that strange? Did you draw on anything?
Not really. No-one really knows how to be a father when you first begin – there’s no way to prepare for it. And it’s very easy to react to holding a baby, especially when the baby is looking like a newborn and you’ve just delivered it. So, you end up being very careful with it and stuff. But it’s strange when Mackenzie [Foy] starts playing baby Renesmee, as you suddenly have to think, “My daughter is now 11 years old. It’s two months after she’s born and she can speak.” So, that was a complicated thing to play. But it’s a fantasy movie, so I guess you just go along with it. It’s the ultimate fantasy, I guess, to some people, that you can avoid all the annoying parts of having a kid, if they’re already fending for themselves. It’s like having a puppy. Just leave it alone and thank you very much.
So, what about filming the sex scenes…
It’s funny when people talk about the sex scenes in the book, because there aren’t actually any sex scenes in the book – it’s all in people’s imagination. Like the thing with the feathers. They don’t mention anything apart from the fact that there are feathers afterwards, but that’s why all the
Twilight fans are so fixated on the feathers – “They’ve got to show the feathers in the movie!” I guess that’s the only scary thing about doing it in the movie, because you have to show something, you can’t fade to black – if you did, people would go insane. At the end of the day, watching some other people have sex is never going to be that spectacular – hopefully it will be kind of good. It’s a strange thing when there’s so much hype about it – you’re like, “God, I hope this lives up to it.”
Breaking Dawn, the book, is very different from the others in the series.
When the book came out, I was like, “Wow, she really broke the whole box! She’s not even thinking outside the box anymore.” She went all-out in the last one. It’s such an incredibly bizarre story-line and it all kind of works as well. It was really brave.
What about the childbirth scene? That’s pretty spectacular in the book.
It seemed insanely graphic when we were doing it. I guess the one thing [director] Bill [Condon] had going for him was that the book is from Bella’s perspective and she’s out of her mind with pain, so the scene is from that point of view. I haven’t actually seen how he’s cut it together, but when we were doing it, I was like, “This is horrific!” And especially because we did it with a real baby as well. I was like, “What a horrible introduction – this baby’s never going to be an actor, ever.”
Do you ever look up stuff that’s written about you on the internet?
Sometimes, mainly for practical purposes – like if you feel like you’ve said something stupid, you go and check to see what the backlash is about and see if you have to do another interview to dissipate that! It’s always mainly just damage control all the time.
You filmed in Brazil. What are the fans like over there?
They’re very passionate. There were about 400 people outside our hotel in Rio [de Janeiro] who were shouting, “Rob! Kristen!” the whole time until about three o’clock in the morning. They stopped for four hours – obviously to let us sleep for a bit – and then four hours later, started again. When they were quiet, we looked out of the window and they were all still standing there, just in silence – they just gave up for a bit. It was amazing.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 is in cinemas now.