Taylor Lautner Almost Didn’t Play Jacob After The First Twilight Film

Twihards came very close to a world without Taylor Lautner in the Twilight franchise. During an interview on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast with his wife Tay Lautner, released on Dec. 13, the actor revealed that he almost lost his role as Jacob Black after the first Twilight movie due to his physical appearance.

“Yeah, they called me and said, ‘Thank you for your participation, but we are recasting you for the rest of the franchise,’” he confirmed.

Rumors that Lautner was going to be recast first spread back in 2008, when his name was left off a press release for the first Twilight sequel New Moon, and actor Michael Copon started a very public campaign to take over the character.

However, it wasn’t anything personal with Lautner. “Their plan was to just cast a regular 16-year-old, which I was at the time, and then they were going to cast someone in their mid-20s to be Jacob for the rest of the franchise,” he explained.

How Lautner Kept His Role

In the first Twilight book, Jacob is written as a scrawny 16-year-old kid who grows into a much more muscular young man (and werewolf) by the second book New Moon. Producers hoped to follow this pattern by casting a new actor for the sequels, but they didn’t know that Lautner had started to gain muscle in hopes of retaining his role.

“I had to fight for my role in the franchise and, thankfully, I had already hit the gym the second we finished filming the first movie,” he recalled. “When my team got the call they said, ‘Have you seen him recently?’ and they said, ‘No, why?’ My team said, ‘You might want to take a meeting with him or something.’”

How Kristen Stewart Helped Out

Producers listened to Lautner’s team and “were surprised” by his growth when they saw him. “I’d been hardcore working out for about nine months and had added 20-25 pounds of muscle by that point,” he said. However, he still had to re-audition to play Jacob, despite proving his acting chops in the first film.

“They didn’t make it easy,” he quipped.

Luckily, co-star Kristen Stewart, who played his love interest Bella Swan, was fully supportive and helped him keep his rightful part. “Thankfully Kristen said, ‘You’re not reading with any casting director, you’re reading with me,’ which was very sweet of her, and it all worked out,” he explained.

His friendship with Stewart is still going strong long after the Twilight franchise has ended. In 2019, she attended Lautner’s 27th birthday party thrown by his then-girlfriend Tay, and more recently, he supported Stewart’s ghost-hunting show Living For the Dead when their mutual friend CJ Romero posted about casting on Instagram. “LETS GOOOO!!!!!” he commented.

Was His Wife Team Jacob?

Hilariously, who played Jacob may not have mattered to Lautner’s wife Tay, because she was Team Edward as a teenager. In July 2022, Tay participated in the “show your childhood crush and then the person you ended up with" trend on Instagram, using photos of his onscreen rival Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen before a DJ scratch cued photos of Lautner.

“I think it’s time to come clean...” she captioned the post. Lautner took the development in stride, joking, “‘Bout time I won something.”