{"id":746459,"date":"2026-08-22T19:22:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-22T19:22:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/746459\/"},"modified":"2026-08-22T19:22:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-22T19:22:15","slug":"the-2004-movie-that-could-have-launched-robert-pattinsons-career","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/746459\/","title":{"rendered":"The 2004 movie that could have launched Robert Pattinson’s career"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Robert<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still<\/p>\n

Sat 22 August 2026 12:30, UK <\/p>\n

In 2008, a blue-tinted romantic fantasy movie full of vampires and werewolves emerged to instant popularity, cementing Robert Pattinson<\/a> as one of the ultimate heartthrobs of the era. <\/p>\n

Twilight was unavoidable, and while it certainly wasn\u2019t good, it has had an irreversible effect on teen-oriented cinema ever since.\u00a0In the wake of the series\u2019 release, which spanned 2008 to 2012, subsequent supernatural or dystopian franchises dominated the box office. <\/p>\n

From The Maze Runner to The Hunger Games, even the much less teen-friendly erotic series Fifty Shades of Grey wouldn\u2019t exist without Twilight. Its impact was mammoth<\/a>; teenagers simply couldn\u2019t get enough of this human-vampire-werewolf love triangle, although Pattinson certainly could.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He quickly became sick of the franchise, poking fun at it in interviews. He once told Empire, \u201cThe more I read the script, the more I hated this guy, so that\u2019s how I played him, as a manic-depressive who hates himself. Plus, he\u2019s a 108-year-old virgin, so he\u2019s obviously got some issues there.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

While Pattinson has since accepted the franchise for what it is, being grateful that Twilight gave him the boost he needed to become a star, it\u2019s impressive that he was able to forge an acclaimed career out of something so critically panned. I mean, since then, he has worked with the likes of Robert Eggers, David Cronenberg, Christopher Nolan, Claire Denis, and Lynne Ramsay, even playing the titular superhero in Matt Reeves\u2019 dark take on The Batman.<\/a><\/p>\n

But where did it all begin for Pattinson? Interestingly, the actor didn\u2019t actually have dreams of becoming a performer when he was young, only taking on professional roles as a teenager after being encouraged to act as a way to get over his shyness. Little did he know that within a few years\u2019 time, he\u2019d be leading one of the biggest cinematic sensations of the 21st century.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sadly for him, his first-ever movie role as the son of Reese Witherspoon\u2019s character in Vanity Fair<\/a> was cut from the final version of the film, making his efforts feel rather fruitless, but luckily, things soon turned around when he bagged the part of Cedric Diggory in the Harry Potter series, the perfect primer for his tenure in another beloved franchise a few years later.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Further reading: Cutting Room Floor<\/p>\n

Yet, before both of these roles, Pattinson actually auditioned for a blockbuster that could\u2019ve given his career a slightly different start, and it\u2019s interesting to consider whether this would\u2019ve still led him to Twilight. In the early 2000s, he tried his luck at a part in a certain religious epic, telling The Independent, \u201cMy first film audition was for Troy. I was auditioning to play Brad Pitt\u2019s cousin. I was like, \u2018What? I\u2019m gonna play Brad Pitt\u2019s cousin!\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

This could\u2019ve launched Pattinson\u2019s career a few years earlier, but clearly, these things take time. The audition didn\u2019t work out for the inexperienced actor, and Garrett Hedlund nabbed the part of Patroclus instead. Years on, though, and Pattinson has gotten to appear in another Homer adaptation, Nolan\u2019s The Odyssey<\/a> (Troy was based on The Iliad), which fared much better with critics than Wolfgang Petersen\u2019s 2004 film.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still Sat 22 August 2026 12:30, UK In 2008, a blue-tinted romantic fantasy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":726138,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[92249,204164,27787,45228,8077,6491,24516,96,1293,35588,113359,102045,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-746459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-2000s","tag-204164","tag-action-movies","tag-audition","tag-brad-pitt","tag-celebrities","tag-drama","tag-entertainment","tag-history","tag-robert-pattinson","tag-troy","tag-twilight","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=746459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746459\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/726138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=746459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=746459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=746459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}