When you spot a good vampire, you just know!
From the very beginning, Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke knew that casting was going to be tough. While teenager Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) was locked in early on, finding the perfect actor to portray vampire Edward Cullen was a little trickier.
On the Jan. 19 episode of Spotify's The Big Hit Show podcast, Catherine looked back on the moment Kristen auditioned with Robert Pattinson. In just a short amount of time, she knew something special was brewing.
"I wanted somebody that didn't seem like a real person," she explained to host Alex Pappademas. "Who is that going to be? This vampire has lived for 90-something years. He's ethereal, he's special, he's unique, he's internal, he's brooding, he's everything, you know, iconic."
Catherine described in detail the first audition Rob and Kristen had together, in the bedroom of her house.
"They did the kissing scene and he fell off and landed right there on this floor," she recalled while giving a tour of her Venice Beach house. "Rob was so into it, he fell off the bed. I'm like, ‘Dude, calm down.' And I'm in there filming with my little video camera, you know, whatever."
At the end of the audition, Catherine recalled Kristen pushing for Rob to get the role. "I could tell they had a lot of chemistry," she said. "And I thought, ‘Oh my god, Kristen was 17, I don't want to get in some illegal thing.' So I remember I told Rob, ‘By the way, Kristen is 17. In our country, it's illegal for them to have sexual relations.' And he's like, ‘Oh, OK, whatever.'" At the time, Robert was 21.
While the two actors weren't romantically involved when they first started filming the movie, they began dating in the middle of 2009 and eventually broke up in 2013.
Kristen recently recalled her instant chemistry with Robert in a November profile for The New Yorker.
"It was so clear who worked," she said. "[He had an] intellectual approach that was combined with ‘I don't give a f--k about this, but I'm going to make this sing.' And I was like, ‘Ugh, same.'"
For even more secrets behind the making of Twilight, keep scrolling.