Robert Pattinson Almost Ruined ‘Twilight’ in The Early Stages of Making The Movie

Twilight was a massive success and caused a frenzy that hasn’t fully gone away more than a decade later. It also skyrocketed its stars to super-stardom, whether they liked it or not. But it almost went down the drain before they even started filming, thanks to Robert Pattinson. 

Robert Pattinson didn’t impress the studio executives before making ‘Twilight’

Any fan of Pattinson’s knows that he has a signature sort of rumpled look to him. It’s now seen as attractive and chic, but before he was a major star, this style of his almost cost the movie. 

In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2018, Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke shared how much trouble she was having trying to get the movie funded and made. After she cast Kristen Stewart and Pattinson in the starring roles, they met with Summit Entertainment executives to fully get the movie off the ground. And Pattinson’s appearance almost scared the execs off. 

“He was a bit disheveled,” Hardwicke said. She told Vanity Fair that the people in charge asked, “Can this guy look good?” It took some convincing that Pattinson would fit the role of an attractive vampire with a tortured soul with some “cleaning up.”

Of course, as history now knows, Pattinson kept his role and Hardwicke made the movie. The studio didn’t think that it was going to garner much attention though, and cut funding and gave disparaging remarks about the movie. But that ended up being far from the case. 

Pattinson was cast because of his ‘electric’ chemistry with Kristen Stewart

Hardwicke recalled the casting process with People in 2018 as well, a decade after the mega-franchise was born. 

“For me, it was really important to have a great chemistry [between Bella and Edward],” Hardwicke explained, telling what she wanted from her Bella and Edward. “[They] had to be the coolest couple that you just had to feel that electricity between them.”

Hardwicke cast Stewart first, after she saw her performance in Into the Wild. Finding the perfect Edward Cullen proved more difficult, but after Pattinson and Stewart read together, it was evident that Hardwicke found her vampire. 

“It was pretty positive. After the end of their audition, I could tell that there was a lot of electricity and chemistry,” she said.

Stewart and Pattinson dated while the franchise was at its peak but then split not long after the final film premiered. They both went the independent film route, opting to stay away from the limelight they were forced into for years thanks to Twilight. 

“They both found a way to handle it and still stay very true to themselves, which is amazing,” Hardwicke said about the two post-Twilight. “[They’ve been able] to greenlight tons of wonderfully diverse, interesting indie films that would have never gotten made. They were able to parlay the fortune and the fame into the kind of art that they were ultimately more interested in.”

Hardwicke was given a lot of freedom with ‘Twilight’ 

Even though Hardwicke has faced a lot of disrespect from the studio since, with reports that she was “difficult” to work with, she was given a lot of freedom with the film, which she seems grateful for now. 

“I wasn’t forced to hire a famous movie star from the Disney Channel or whatever,” Hardwicke told The Daily Beast in 2018. “[Stewart] wasn’t a household name. And then even with Rob, he’d been in Harry Potter but that was several years before and he hadn’t gone on and done much visible stuff since then, so he was pretty unknown too.”

She appreciated how the studio stuck with that theme throughout the rest of the casting process as well. 

“None of the other actors in any other roles were names or anything,” Hardwicke said. “They didn’t even try like, ‘Let’s cast up the parents!’ No, we just made it, and really in a personal way.”