Robert Pattinson Reveals Whether He's Still in Contact With Kristen Stewart, Talks Twilight Backlash

Actor says playing Edward Cullen was "one of the hardest jobs I've ever done"

By Zach Johnson May 28, 2014 4:08 PMTags
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Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart's love was immortalized in five Twilight films, but off camera, the co-stars' romance fizzled after the actress had a fling with then-married director Rupert Sanders.

Nearly two years have passed since Stewart was unknowingly photographed kissing Liberty Ross' husband. Though she and Pattinson tried to make it work, they eventually called it quits. Have the exes kept in touch? "Oh, yeah," Pattinson says blithely in the June 6 edition of The Hollywood Reporter.

Pattinson has earned acclaim for his post-Twilight work, yet he can't seem to escape his past. Asked to reflect on the blockbuster franchise today, he says, "Everything changed when they did the marketing, and the general public started to view [the films] in a different way when they started to push the 'team' aspect of it. It was like, 'I'm on Team Edward or Team Jacob.' That saturated everything, and suddenly there was a backlash. Whereas with the first [film], there wasn't a backlash at all."

Prior to being cast, director Catherine Hardwicke called him at 2:30 a.m. According to Pattinson, they had a "ridiculous conversation, and I hadn't read the books or the script or anything and I just bulls--tted on the phone." At his audition, the actor recalls, "They were doing screen tests with four people. In one of the scenes, I [was meant] to take my shirt off, and I think I was the one guy who didn't."

Playing Edward Cullen was trickier than one might imagine. "It was quite a constricting character, in a way," Pattinson says of author Stephenie Meyer's now iconic vampire. "You want to make [him] as dramatic as possible, but you have someone who never loses his temper, and so it's like, 'How the f--k do you do this?'" the British actor explains. "I think that was one of the hardest jobs I've ever done."

Pattinson earned raves for his performances in Maps to the Stars and The Rover during the Cannes Film Festival, and the 28-year-old movie star says he's got more tricks up his sleeve. "I don't know if I've really particularly found my feet as an actor yet," the actor says. "I have to prove certain things."