Henry Cavill on being Stephenie Meyer's dream Edward Cullen in Twilight: "I didn’t know about the movie"
Meyer gushed about Cavill as Edward Cullen in her old blogs
If Twilight author Stephenie Meyer had her way, Henry Cavill would have played a man “impossibly fast and strong” long before signing on to play Superman. For her, Cavill made the perfect Edward Cullen—Robert Pattinson be damned.
Upon Summit Entertainment picking up Twilight, Meyer put forth her dream cast for the film on her blog, including some bold suggestions such as John C. Reilly, Rachel Leigh Cook, and Cillian Murphy for assorted roles. While R-Pattz was in the original shortlist of popular fan suggestions, it was obvious that Henry Cavill was Meyer’s top choice for the role. However, with him already being 24 at the time, he aged out of the hypothetical role.
“The most disappointing thing for me is losing my perfect Edward,” Meyer wrote in 2007. “Henry Cavill is now 24 years old. Let us have a moment of quiet in which to mourn…” Cavill had caught Meyer’s eye for his performance in the 2001 film The Count Of Monte Cristo.
All of this is news to Henry Cavill, who knew nothing about the book series or the developing movies at the time. However, now the Man Of Steel actor says playing one of the Cullen clan would have been “cool.”
“I didn’t know about the movie. I didn’t know about them wanting to cast me and the internet wasn’t quite the tool that it is now, and so I only found out afterwards,” Cavill says in an interview with the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “I was like, ‘Oh okay, that would have been cool.’”
While Cavill did not have his sights set on the role of Edward Cullen, Pattinson did manage to snuff him out of a big franchise role a few years earlier: Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire.
“Yeah, I remember that, definitely auditioned for that one… and did not get it,” he said with a laugh. “The audition may have gone well, it may have gone terribly. I’m sure someone out there has footage which hopefully is locked away and will never be seen. But yeah, I didn’t get it. It wasn’t right.”
Well, both Cavill and Pattinson ended up playing caped superheroes for the DC industrial complex, so we guess it all evened out in the end.