If you’re a fan of the Twilight Saga, you may have already heard of the latest movie, Eclipse. One of the stars of Eclipse is Robert Pattinson, who plays the half-vampire, Edward Cullen. A year after the movie’s premier, it seems that we’re still wondering about Edward’s true age. While we know that he’s not a day over thirty-three, is he really a child star, or has he secretly been a grown-up for a while now?
If you thought that Robert Pattinson’s Twilight character had gone through a significant personality change in order to fit in with an adult crowd, then you might be surprised to learn that he’s actually been playing the part of a teen for a long time. Before Twilight, Pattinson’s acting career consisted of mostly school plays, and even then he was usually the younger, or at least the same age as the other characters. Aside from a couple of brief mentions in his debut feature film, The Firm, Pattinson hasn’t really been seen outside of children’s clothing until Twilight. Since Edward Cullen is a werewolf, it’s very rare to see him in anything warmer than a coat and hat, and even then he looks more like a child than a grown man.
It seems that even Twilight fans didn’t realize that Edward has been acting his entire adult life. In fact, even his co-stars didn’t know about it; when they found out that he hadn’t actually grown up, some were even a little suspicious.
Upon learning of Pattinson’s true age, many expressed their disbelief that he had been playing a child so well. While it’s not hard to conceal your adult appearance when you’re performing on a movie set, it takes more preparation to play a 16-year-old, and even then you can’t be too careful. Pattinson was eventually given an unheated walk-on part in Twilight, but was almost fired from the movie before filming was completed because of his extreme precociousness. Since then he’s played a wide array of characters, from a fourteen-year-old kid in The Ghost Writer to a twelve-year-old boy in David Fincher’s The Social Network. In general, Pattinson’s career has consisted of playing kids or young teens, and he’s even said in interviews that it’s difficult for him to play scenes opposite adults because he doesn’t feel like he can relate to them.
It’s clear that Robert Pattinson has been playing a kid his entire acting career, and because of this, he’ll forever be associated with the young, wild, and often feisty creature that we all love so much. However, this doesn’t mean that he’s still a child. Far from it, in fact!