Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke has some thoughts on who would be cast as the main characters if the film were to be rebooted today.
During an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast to discuss the film 15 years after it originally came out, the filmmaker chimed in on who she’d want to play Edward Cullen and Bella Swan in a film today.
When asked if Jacob Elordi and Jenna Ortega would portray the two main characters, Hardwicke admitted, “Oh, that would be perfect,” she said, adding of Elordi, “I mean, he’s amazing. He probably would be Edward today.”
She explained that so many people come to mind when she thinks about who could be cast in the roles in the present day. Model Lewis Tan approached her recently and told her he went out for the role of Jacob Black, which eventually went to Taylor Lautner.
“It would’ve changed anyone’s life if they got that part,” she said. Hardwicke doubled down on her choice of Ortega playing Bella today. “I do think there’s a lot of really cool young actors today. Of course, you just mentioned Jenna Ortega, she’s amazing.”
In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, in honor of Twilight‘s 15th anniversary, the director explained that she knew she had found her Bella in Kristen Stewart pretty early on in the process when she saw the actress in the trailer for 2007’s Into the Wild.
Hardwicke flew to Pittsburgh where Stewart was shooting a movie and saw her screen test with Jackson Rathbone, who went on to play Jasper Cullen, one of Edward’s adopted siblings. “At the end of the day, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, she’s really cool, and she’s got all that angst,’” the filmmaker recalled.
However, she noted that finding the actor to play Edward ended up being way more difficult than finding her Bella. The actors who auditioned didn’t give the impression that they had been alive for almost a century and didn’t have the soulful angst he needed to have.
Eventually, she and the casting directors were down to four actors, including Rathbone, Shiloh Fernandez, Ben Barnes and Robert Pattinson, who paid for his own flight from London because production was on a tight budget.
They all did chemistry reads with Stewart, but when Pattinson did his, Hardwicke knew he was the one because she felt “that electricity” between them. The two went on to be a couple for four years after meeting on set.
A Twilight series is in the works but little is known of the project at this point, sources told THR in April. Sinead Daly — who has worked on projects like Tell Me Lies, The Walking Dead: World Beyond, Raised by Wolves and The Get Down — will write the script. Sources said she is working with Lionsgate TV to determine if the series will be a remake of Stephenie Meyer’s books or something else entirely.
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