Kristen Stewart Once Said She Couldn’t Have Done ‘Twilight’ if Robert Pattinson Wasn’t Cast
Both Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson became megastars after teaming up for the successful Twilight films. But Stewart needed Pattinson to be cast alongside her. If anyone else got the part, Stewart’s Twilight performance might have been very different as a result.
Kristen Stewart only had 1 audition for ‘Twilight’
Stewart was the first choice for the role of Bella Swan in the popular Twilight series. The film’s filmmaker, Catherine Hardwicke, was interested in casting Stewart after seeing the actor in the feature Into the Wild.
“It was like hey, I saw this girl in this indie film, she has some very nice scenes in Into the Wild, I think she would be good. She really shows this deep longing. And they’re like, OK. She wasn’t a household name,” Hardwicke once told Daily Beast.
All it took was one audition from Stewart to completely convince Hardwicke that she had her Bella.
“It was a very conventional audition. I read with another actor for a really long period. It was, like, five hours. I don’t know if we completely agreed conceptually about who this character is, because everyone reads Bella differently, and I’ve never agreed with any one person entirely. But after that first audition, we had a really thriving working relationship. It was like, Wow, I want to play like this all the time,” Stewart once told Time.
Kristen Stewart once said she couldn’t have done ‘Twilight’ if Robert Pattinson wasn’t cast
Casting Stewart’s co-lead in the long-running Vampire series proved to be far more challenging than hiring Stewart herself. Stewart and Hardwicke screen-tested several actors, but none of these aspiring superstars managed to impress them. Pattinson, however, seemed to offer Stewart what she was looking for in a co-star and movie love interest.
“He wasn’t just concerned with standing in a statuesque way and posing. He had the right things going on in his head and at the same time he was very responsive. He didn’t have this set thing that he was doing, he could see me,” Stewart once told MTV News.
Pattinson’s acting also helped serve Stewart’s own performance in a way that the other actors didn’t in the audition.
“Depending on what I did he would change his performance. I hate it when people are so structured that they’ve got what they’re doing down. But we could see each other. It was a responsiveness thing. I didn’t have that with anybody else. I was thinking, ‘Argh, everyone is lying to me. Why are you lying? Just have the balls to do it for real,’” she added.
Stewart would’ve tried to develop the chemistry needed with a different performer. But in the end, she was adamant she had to share the screen alongside Pattinson.
“If Rob didn’t get the part, if they didn’t think I was right about who we should cast, I couldn’t have done the movie. I probably would have done it if he never came in and just made it work with someone else,” she said.
Why Kristen Stewart told herself she didn’t want to be a part of ‘Twilight’
Stewart had to warm up a little to the concept of Twilight before committing to the movies. Initially, she was put off by how the movie was pitched to her.
“When I read little brief descriptions of the movie, I was like, ‘I don’t want to be part of that.’ I was working on something else, and I didn’t want to have my focus stray. It was like, ‘I don’t wanna be part of this very set unrealistic ideological of love and push it on every little girl because they’re never gonna get that,'” she said.
But after diving deeper into what Twilight was about, she became enamored with the story. She realized her Twilight character was going to be stronger than she originally guessed.
“Bella wears the pants in the relationship. She’s the sure-footed confident one. She’s naive to the world of vampires and everything like that, but she’s not doing it for him. It takes a lot of power and strength to subject yourself to someone completely, to give up the power. It has to start there,” she said.
