To the casual observer, Edward Cullen from Twilight seems like a pretty morose dude. He’s got pale skin, he wears dark clothes, and he drinks blood, all of which would make most people a little gloomy. Robert Pattinson, who played Edward in the Twilight movies, felt the same way—at least until the movie’s producers told him to cheer up or get fired. Pattinson explained all of this in a recent appearance on Howard Stern’s Sirius XM show, saying that his vision for Edward was for the character to be “really intense” and dark.
“If you’re going into a relationship with someone,” Pattinson said, “the way to make it really intense is if you can barely talk to each other, you can barely touch each other.” He figured that teenage relationships are all like that, but since Edward Cullen is a vampire and thinks of himself as a monster, then he should be more intense than anyone ever. Unfortunately, the producers hate it, and Pattinson’s agents flew up to the set and told him, “You have to do the opposite of what you’re doing now or you’re going to get fired today.”
Apparently, the Twilight producers didn’t want a sad Edward, they wanted an Edward who was “happy and having fun.” To sell their case, they even gave Pattinson a copy of the Twilight book where every instance of Edward smiling was highlighted in one color and every instance where he frowned was highlighted in a different color to illustrate the balance between fun and misery. Considering how gloomy Edward still seemed in the movie, though, maybe he still could’ve smiled more.