How The Twilight Cast Really Felt About The Sparkly Vampire Makeup
The vampires in Stephenie Meyer’s hit “Twilight Saga” are … a little different than the vampires you might be used to. When Bella Swan, played by Kristen Stewart in the film adaptations, moves to the overcast town of Forks, Washington, she meets Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), a mysterious, handsome “high-schooler” who, as it turns out, is over a century old and also happens to be a vampire. When Edward finally admits this to Bella, he tells her something else: he sparkles in the sunlight, which is precisely why he and his vampire family chose a town that’s mostly cloudy.
According to Jackson Rathbone, who plays Edward’s adopted vampire brother Jasper Cullen, Pattinson particularly hated the makeup that helped him become a sparkly vampire. During an appearance at a convention (via ScreenRant), Rathbone said that they all hated the glitter, but Pattinson got the worst of it.
“They would do all the ‘Twilight’ sparkle testing, so every once in a while you would see Rob [Pattinson] come out of the makeup trailer completely pissed off and angry,” Rathbone recalled. “Half his face is sparking super hard, the other half is a little sparkle. It’s like, ‘Mate, what’s going on?’ It went from being rainy day to bright sunny day, which is actually even worse, because if it’s sunny they’ve got to make us sparkle. It was one of those things where the sun would come out, and we’d be like, ‘Yay!’ Except for production, ‘That’s screwing us even more!'”
Wait, why do the vampires in Twilight sparkle?
Throughout the “Twilight” books — which are told through Bella’s point of view — the young girl more or less constantly comments on how Edward’s skin is so cold it borders on freezing. Apparently, this is part of the reason why the vampires in “Twilight” sparkle in the sun; their skin is basically marble with no bloodflow, and it’s so cold and impervious that it causes a sparkling effect.
Silly as it seems, it makes some sense within the confines of Meyer’s world, but it does differentiate her vampires quite drastically from the traditional model. In most vampiric lore, the supernatural creatures can only be outside at night because they’re actually killed by sunlight, but the “Twilight” vampires are, apparently, built different (or, more specifically, they’re created to appeal to young women reading the books and watching the films who don’t want to watch the love interest burn and explode in stark sunlight). Robert Pattinson and Jackson Rathbone’s final adopted brother, Kellan Lutz, has admitted that he finds this whole concept pretty ridiculous. In 2012, Lutz spoke to Jeremy Kinser at Document Journal (via HuffPost) and said that he was hesitant to even join the franchise because he didn’t love the script, but he also honed in on the sparkling thing. “How scary would a glimmering vampire really be?” Lutz said at the time. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
Filming Twilight could be tricky sometimes, according to its stars
Robert Pattinson isn’t the only one who had a rough time filming “Twilight,” though the difficulties weren’t always makeup-related. Kellan Lutz actually told his co-star Ashley Greene — who played his adopted vampire sister Alice — on the podcast “The Twilight Effect during a 2022 episode (via Business Insider) that he very nearly left the franchise before the two-part finale “Breaking Dawn” because filming was just … boring. “I remember some days we were just waiting on set,” Lutz recalled. “‘Twilight’ and all the movies were probably the most waiting on set I’ve ever experienced. For people who know me, I’m very impatient and I like being busy and doing stuff. I’d rather be doing stuff than sitting there, standing there.”
Anna Kendrick, who plays human high schooler Jessica Stanley in the franchise, also revealed that the weather made filming truly terrible sometimes. While filming a scene in rainy Portland, Oregon, Kendrick remembered, “I just remember my Converse being completely soaked through and feeling like, ‘You know, this is a really great group of people and I’m sure that we would be friends at a different time, but I want to murder everyone.'” Still, she said at least they were in it together: “Although it was also kind of bonding. There was something about it– like you go through some trauma event. Like you imagine people who survive a hostage situation, and you’re kind of bonded for life.”
“Twilight” was, clearly, not an ideal filming process for everyone involved, from sparkly makeup to rainy days — but the fans of the franchise still love the finished product.
