Robert Pattinson Poked Fun At An Ongoing Twilight Complaint

It’s not just the vampires that are immortal in Twilight. Movie fans’ passionate feelings about the five-film saga live on, whether they loved or hated it. Robert Pattinson opened up about the movie series’ staying power in a recent interview with GQ Spain, and he shared that he regularly hears the same complaint, 17 years after first playing the brooding Edward Cullen.

Eternal Notoriety

For Pattinson, seeing Twilight’s “renaissance” in recent years has been a nice surprise. “It’s hard to believe the cultural relevance that these movies maintain because they’re very old,” he said in the translated interview, noting, “The first one was released in 2008, f*ck!”

The actor even seems delighted by the criticism the movies still attract. “I’m fascinated that people keep telling me, ‘Dude, Twilight ruined the vampire genre,’” he said. Then he playfully added, “You’re still stuck on that sh*t? How can you be sad about something that happened almost 20 years ago? It’s very crazy.”

Pattinson expected the movies to be forgotten by now. In an April 2011 cover story for Vanity Fair, amid the height of Twilight mania, he admitted to having “always said” to the people around him that it would only take 10 years.

A New Outlook

Despite starring in the box office juggernaut, Pattinson never hid his thoughts on the franchise or the Stephenie Meyer vampire romance novels they were based on. In fact, in the lead-up to the first movie’s release in November 2008, he told E! (via ComingSoon) that after he read the first book, he felt like it “wasn’t supposed to be published.” He likened it to “reading [Meyer’s] sexual fantasy,” later adding, “Sometimes you would feel uncomfortable reading this thing.”

Beyond that, Pattinson hated the fame that came with the movies. “I had people sitting outside my house every single day, and it drove me crazy,” he told NME in September 2015, per People. He added that he “didn’t go into a supermarket for about six years” because he had to worry about all the attention.

Luckily for Pattinson, the fan fervor eventually reached a level he could enjoy. When he spoke about Twilight to USA Today in April 2019, he said it was “kind of cool” to see the franchise go from “a massive phenomenon” in its early days to a “retro thing” years later.

“It’s lovely now that the mania is not so intense,” he said. “People come up [to me] and just have very fond memories of it. It’s a really sweet thing. I think the only scary part was right in the thick of it all, when it was very, very intense. Now the intensity has died down and it’s just very warm memories.”