Why I'm Grateful for 'Twilight'

Stardom for young actors can be a blessing and a curse. Think back to being in your early 20s. Now image having so little maturity, and suddenly you’re rich and famous. You have more money than you’ve ever had before, and total strangers feel like it’s their right to know everything about your personal business. There’s no use complaining, because you have money and fame and are therefore considered powerful, even though you’re just a young actor. Your grasp on money and fame is tenuous, and you work in an industry where there could be a new hot young thing by the end of the week. Also, you still have to go to work in the morning, and work is a 12-hour day where you pretend to a vampire or in love with a vampire.

It was easy for me to sneer at Twilight when it burst on the scene in 2008 because I was an immature guy in my early 20s who thought superhero movies were more important than the YA vampire movie that appealed to a different demographic. It was also easy to dismiss its young stars. They hadn’t been in too much (you know, because they were young), and I had no investment in the books. Kristen Stewart seemed like a blank slate that viewers could use as their surrogate, and Robert Pattinson had manga hair.

During the years of The Twilight Saga, you didn’t have to pay them much mind. Stewart was fine in a supporting role in smaller films like Adventureland and The Runaways (although she plays Joan Jett in the latter, the film is really more about Dakota Fanning’s Cherie Currie). Her attempt at a blockbuster, Snow White and the Huntsman, was a dud. Pattinson was cast as a handsome man for romances like Water for Elephants, Bel Ami, and Remember Me (the last of which is only memorable because of its completely insane ending). Audiences only seemed to be interested in these two actors as their Twilight characters, Bella Swan and Edward Cullen.

And then Stewart and Pattinson did the smartest thing possible: They stopped caring about blockbuster success. Rather than chase the fame and fortune they received from The Twilight Saga, both actors decided to use their cache to go work with auteurs in smaller features.

Over the remainder of the 2010s, Stewart would do an occasional mainstream feature like American Ultra (re-teaming her with Adventureland co-star Jesse Eisenberg) or the reboot of Charlie’s Angels (a movie she’s very good in, but also one she now says she hated making), but her interest was primarily indie films. Furthermore, she didn’t need to be the lead of these movies. She was clearly fine if Juliette Binoche got top billing in Clouds of Sils Maria or if it went to Laura Dern for Certain Women. That’s not to say that every small film starring Stewart was great, but she seemed far more interested in working with certain actors and directors than trying to be the most famous actor on Earth.

Pattison followed a similar route. He made two movies with David Cronenberg (Cosmopolis and Maps to the Stars) and signaled that he didn’t mind playing giant weirdos or scumbags like in Good Time, The Lighthouse, or The Devil All the Time. Again, like Stewart, it wasn’t necessarily a matter of only starring in good movies (because whether we like to admit it or not, a film’s overall quality is largely out of the actors’ hands), but stretching himself as an actor. While you could cynically say that this was simply a matter of “dirtying up” his image after playing a sparkly vampire for four years, that doesn’t change the fact that he’s genuinely good in these movies. I don’t think you get Pattinson as the best guy to play Batman unless he had done time in the trenches playing brooding weirdos, which is what Batman is.

And this is where credit goes to Twilight. I should pause here to note that my wife’s enjoyment of the Twilight series has given me a greater appreciation of the films. Neither of us thinks that the books or the movies are necessarily “good” by the rules of literature or filmmaking, and she has pointed out how author Stephanie Meyer clumsily tried to make her story appropriate for YA audiences by omitting the sex—but didn’t bother to take out the toxic masculinity. Still, being able to see Twilight through the eyes of a fan, I can better understand the appeal of the story, why it’s delightfully silly, and how it avoids the bloat that has affected so many other franchises.

Twilight is what franchises should aspire to be in the sense that it ends. It’s almost a platonic ideal of a franchise. It has a built-in fanbase, they show up for every movie, and then it’s over! Maybe that’s because it’s a product of its time, but we didn’t have to dig through spinoffs and prequels. The actors got in, they did the work, and they got out. There was no ongoing contractual obligation, nor was there any question (due to the characters being ageless vampires) of whether the actors would be interested in coming back for more “if the right story came along,” (a line actors feel obligated to trot out whenever they’re asked about reprising a role).

It’s not that I think Twilight is particularly great movie (although I think it knows what it is and has fun with it, which is more than I can say of other adaptations of hit novels), but it’s easier to view it fondly because it now feels like it gifted us two exciting stars even if the work they did in those movies wasn’t all that exciting. We like to think of performances almost as athletics, where if we see good performances in the Twilight movies, it’s like glimpsing an all-star hit homers in the minor league. But acting doesn’t work that way, and young actors need to mature not only with their craft, but in a business that views them as disposable commodities. Twilight may not have been the best material, but it clearly imparted a professionalism that Stewart and Pattinson carry with them into their work.

When I read this insightful profile of Stewart by Adam B. Vary in Variety where she talks about being a proudly queer creative person in Hollywood, I can’t help but admire how she reads her own work as building a part of herself rather than some awkward yearbook photo that has to be hidden away:

Twilight was, and remains, easy to mock because it’s silly, but so are a lot of other franchises. Not all of those series gave us two great actors who will likely be some of cinema’s most interesting performers of the 2020s regardless of the size of the film they’re in. After you’ve been ridiculed in the press and had your personal life dissected, to still be here shows incredible resilience and fortitude.

Not every franchise lends its stars the cache to do interesting things, but out of the unlikely setting of vampires in Forks, Washington, we now have the ongoing work of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. Not too bad for a series known for sparkly vampires.