Twilight Dramatics and the Curse of Being the Female Castmate

This will be my first time (and definitely not my last) digging into the Twilight universe. One I feel quite protective of since I basically grew up in it.

These past few weeks, Kristen Stewart has been promoting her new movie, The Wrong Girls, and so journalists and influencers-masking-as-journalists have been going around asking the usual round of Twilight-related questions. Which is pretty normal for any actor who has been part of something so deeply ingrained in popular culture. It's just like they do with Robert Pattinson every chance they get, except I think Robert has discovered that if he is the one who brings it up first, they don't bother him about it quite as much.

All in all, I think they've both been quite graceful about their vampiric past.

But this week, Twitter users have been going back and forth over the difference in how they respond to these Twi-questions, particularly after an interview with Condé Nast Traveller magazine in which Kristen answered the forever Team Edward or Team Jacob query with “I don't give a fuck.”

shitty pic, sorry

Internet's reaction is a clear example of why we still haven't escaped misogyny and why feminism should keep fighting against these stupid expectations of how women are supposed to behave and respond. We've been praising Rob for being funny when answering these questions while considering Kristen's reactions crass or rude, even though she has entertained every interrogation about that time in her life.

I've been a Twilight fan for about eighteen years, ever since I was an annoying thirteen-year-old. I've obsessed over the books, the movies, the actors, Robsten, the heartbreak of their separation, them following their own paths... You could say I'm an expert.

A lot of the defense of Kristen revolves around reminding everyone that Rob used to publicly mock Twilight throughout the press tours of the movies. Could we call what we're witnessing now Twilight revisionist history?

From my point of view, in case you missed it, this is basically what went on: 

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart signed on to Twilight when they were both doing mostly independent films. The project came from a YA book about an awkward human girl falling in love with an awkward vampire boy, but the film, attached to indie director Catherine Hardwicke (who brought along Thirteen, 2003 cinematographer Elliot Davis and editor Nancy Richardson) was pretty much intended to be a relatively low-budget movie. Art-house, as Rob Pattinson once described what he thought it was going to be.

Everyone loves to mock the performances, the shots, the interesting camera-angle choices and the cheesy dialogue, but I don't believe it was a movie originally intended for mainstream eyes. But then it did go mainstream, and it became something entirely different and much, much bigger. The franchise turned into a full-blown blockbuster machine, which you can clearly see in Eclipse, Breaking Dawn Part 1 and Part 2. (New Moon still contains something of that first film for me. I believe Twilight's soul and Catherine's vision - despite her not being involved at all - were still somehow lingering there.)

Rob, Kristen (and Taylor) would be paraded around, as you usually do with these types of movies, doing endless press tours. As far as Kristen and Robert go, these were two actors who were obviously not used to this kind of press circus by then, and I can imagine it must have felt incredibly stressful, but also forced them to adopt a certain attitude towards the whole thing. 

They were both clearly interested in making very different kinds of films, and while I can see them being genuinely into the vision behind that first Twilight, by the time you get to Eclipse and especially Breaking Dawn, you're asking two actors with pretty specific artistic sensibilities to sit through interview after interview and seriously discuss material that was becoming increasingly ridiculous (As a fan, BD was so fucked up lol). At some point, I imagine, you start feeling a little ridiculous yourself. Watch pretty much any interview from that time and you will 100% see what I'm talking about.

But what's perhaps more important is that neither of them seemed particularly interested in continuing to be part of these types of stories. You can see it now just by looking at their careers. I'd say they're both exactly where they want to be, and while their choices have taken them in very different directions, they both seem drawn to roles and filmmakers with very particular artistic vision. That's quite a different world from what the Twilight story eventually became as the saga progressed.

Back then, around 2011/2012, Robert seemed completely done with the whole thing. I don't necessarily think it came from hatred for the saga, which, by that point, had become ridiculous in its own very special way. Can you imagine going from interview to interview explaining the nature of a demon baby spawned by an eighteen-year-old while simultaneously talking about horrible wigs, questionable scripts and bad CGI? He was clearly done with the story that had not been his type of thing from the beginning. 

And you could see Kristen was done too. Perhaps she was a little more gracious about it, in her sort of cute, awkward way of answering things, but you don't have to be particularly perceptive to see that neither of them seemed entertained by the idea of making movies like the Breaking Dawn ones. If you're a fan, don't let your love for Twilight blind you lol. Those two movies were a disaster... because that book was a disaster. We just enjoy them because it's part of the process.

There's also the fact that during that time they were in a relationship, trying to keep it low-key when that was obviously impossible, and then there was the whole Snow White and the Huntsman thing with the director. Yeah... those days were probably better left behind.

Other than those mocking, joke-y answers Rob became infamous for giving during the Eclipse and Breaking Dawn press tours, I don't actually remember either of them seriously speaking ill of the saga. Whenever they were asked about it more sincerely, they were generally respectful and made it clear how grateful they were for what those films had given them. It's obvious that both of them fought hard to escape the ghosts of those characters, and once you realize it's impossible to fully escape something that big... well, why keep running from it, right? They've proven time and time again what amazing actors they are, so there never has been a reason to sort of run away from it apart of the conception the people have on those sort of media... teenage media. So if you listen to their answers over the last couple of years whenever Twilight comes up, they're both pretty respectful and usually give positive answers.

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DQk7I52kd-o/

Now... as a journalist, or influencer, or whoever they put in front of these actors to ask questions, should you really still be asking Team Edward or Team Jacob to an actress who is there trying to promote an independent film? Especially an actress who has spent years being outspoken about the reality of Hollywood, misogyny within the industry, the difficulties of getting smaller and more unconventional projects made, and the need to support independent art?

There's something particularly frustrating about watching Kristen spend years deliberately building a career outside the blockbuster machine, making strange, risky, LGTBQ+ indie movies and talking openly about why those type of projects also matter, only for someone to sit in front of her while she's trying to promote one of them and go, okay, but Team Edward or Team Jacob? And would you do another Twilight movie? 

Ugh... why... why on earth do people want actors to return to movies that are perfect and don't need to be revisited? Why would Kristen or Rob return to do Twilight? And do what? Rob's like forty, get real.

We constantly complain that Hollywood doesn't make anything original anymore, that everything is franchises, sequels, remakes. But someone like Kristen actually goes out and makes the kind of smaller creative films we're supposedly asking for, and instead of talking to her about that, we drag the giant franchise she made eighteen years ago back into the room.

During an interview with Owen Thiele, he asked Kristen a couple of Twilight-related questions, to which Alia Shawkat (also starring in The Wrong Girls) responded by asking whether Rob was also getting these kinds of questions. Kristen, always respectful, said he was. But the difference is found over the internet, in how people react to their answers. Users compare Robert Pattinson going, “Antinous is like being on Team Jacob,” during the premiere of one of the biggest films of the year (The Odyssey) to interviewers deliberately asking Kristen these nonsensical questions while she's trying to promote the kind of smaller, creative film audiences are always asking Hollywood to make and then somehow leave for last at the theater.

Once upon a time, it was a popular thing to go around saying. No one hates Twilight like Robert Pattinson hates Twilight. See, once upon a time it was also quite popular to hate on the Twilight Saga. And not just dislike it or make fun of its very obvious and serious flaws, but to treat the entire phenomenon, and especially the girls and women who loved it as something inherently embarrassing.

The truth is Twilight belongs to a much bigger conversation about the way we treat entertainment targeted primarily to women and girls. The saga doesn't always make sense. Believe me, I know. It can be ridiculous, it has elements that have aged terribly, and there are relationships and ideas in those books that deserve to be looked at critically. But since when has making perfect sense been a requirement for enjoying something? Transformers doesn't always make sense. Didn't Fast & Furious send a car into space? Entire genres of entertainment traditionally marketed towards men are allowed to be unrealistic and sometimes even terrible while still being treated as legitimate fun. Things made for teenage girls rarely get that same generosity. Girls don't just get to like things that are silly. Their interests become evidence of their "stupidity", of their "shallowness", their "bad taste". They've always mocked us for screaming over boy bands, for obsessing over romance novels, for knowing everything about a pop star or for falling in love with fictional vampires. And then, usually a decade or two later, when enough time has passed and those girls have grown up, we rediscover the thing they loved and decide that maybe it was culturally interesting after all.

None of this means we have to pretend Twilight was flawless or ignore the parts of it that were toxic or very obviously a product of its time. If anything, being able to look back at something you loved and recognize all the ways in which it was fucked up is part of growing up with art. You can criticize something without treating the people who found joy in it as idiots. 

To circle back and wrap things up, it's not that Robert Pattinson is an asshole who hated Twilight or that Kristen is ungrateful for the movies that gave her millions. 

It's insane that in 2026 we're still comfortable finding a man's annoyance funny or charming while reading a woman's "annoyance" as an attitude problem. Rob will roll his eyes at the absurdity of something and become a meme. Kristen says “I don't give a fuck” in response to a question she's probably heard in twelve thousand different forms since she was eighteen, and we discuss it as though she had spat in S. Meyer's face.