Taylor Lautner’s New Show Has A Wild Twilight Connection

The Twilight saga might have taken its final bow more than a decade ago, but like the immortal creatures it made famous, it lives on. Variety reported on Feb. 12 that Taylor Lautner will serve as the star and executive producer of a new series called Taylor Lautner: Werewolf Hunter.

Created by Daisy Gardner, the show — which is currently in development — combines meta elements of Lautner’s real life with werewolves. It isn’t an official entry in the Twilight canon, but it has everything to do with Lautner’s time playing teen werewolf Jacob Black.

“After wrapping the final Twilight film, Taylor Lautner vanished from the spotlight,” reads the series synopsis. “Fans speculated, tabloids theorized — but the truth is wilder than fiction. Taylor wasn’t just taking a mental health break. He was preparing for his real calling… Taylor Lautner: Werewolf Hunter.”

Lautner will play himself, or at least a version of himself who “is drawn into a secret society of werewolf trackers who need his unique expertise.” By day, though, he’s still the actor (and presumable backflipper) fans know and love.

In navigating this “double life,” the description continues, “Taylor must wrestle with the ultimate irony: fighting the very creatures that made him famous.”

Here’s where it gets even more layered: “Between saving the world, reviving his career, and falling in love, he faces the ultimate question — what happens when your biggest role becomes your greatest enemy?”

Revisiting The Twilight Phenomenon

In Werewolf Hunter, Lautner will be fighting werewolves. But that last line echoes Lautner’s emotional reckoning with his time in the Twilight films, which he’s been open about in recent years.

In 2023, he shared on SiriusXM’s Today Show radio that he was “always incredibly thankful and feel super blessed for what [the films] brought me,” but there was potentially some “resentment” from not getting to experience a normal life.

Space and time, however, allowed him to have “only fond memories.”

That same year, Lautner shared on his podcast The Squeeze that the pressure to maintain Jacob’s “unbelievable body” — and the comparisons to his younger self years later — led to challenges with his body image in the decade after Twilight.

“I think in order to get my body physically healthy, it took my mind getting healthy first,” he said. “But, yeah, those side-by-side images continued for years and years. And it really messed with me, and it hurt.”

Today, with some distance from Twilight, it seems like the perfect time for Lautner, who co-hosts his mental health-focused podcast with his wife, Tay Lautner, to recontextualize his career with the help of Werewolf Hunter’s self-aware premise.

“Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in,” the actor joked on Instagram.