On the flipside of this undead dynamic is Jasper Hale, surrogate brother to lead bloodsucker Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). Played by actor/musician Jackson Rathbone, Jasper has a mythology that dates back to the Civil War, where he was vampirized on the battlefield before being adopted by the pacifist Cullen clan and taught to keep his bloodlust in check… for the most part, anyway. He certainly slips up a few times, but her, to err is inhuman.
Rathbone has been keeping busy outside of the Twilight films. He has one of the lead roles in The Last Airbender, the latest from M. Night Shyamalan, as well as a couple of solid (and pretty gruesome) horror efforts under his belt, including the recent Clive Barker adaption Dread. Fango pulled the intelligent, articulate Rathbone away from his lust-crazed fanbase for a few minutes to talk about Twilight and its legacy.
Fang: The novels dedicate a lot of space to Jasper Hale’s backstory. Are we going to see more of that material in the films?
Rathbone: Definitely. Eclipse holds very true to the book, and we’re going to see a lot of that. Jasper was turned back in the Civil War when he was one of the youngest majors, a reall standup guy.
Fang: Jasper becomes a pretty ravenous vampire. What’s the best thing about playing a character like that, and what’s the most difficult?
Rathbone: You get to go to their animalistc side and explore that movement between extremes. Vampires have a connection to humanity, but they have to do this horrible tihng to survive. That’s a big draw for the audience – “Would I take someone else’s life to survive?” The question only gets deeper if you know that by doing so, you get to live eternally. And the hardest thing is playing a good vampire; you just don’t get to kill enough people…
Fang: A lot has been written about the moral movement of the movie vampire as a pop-culture icon. They began as symbols of evil and have slowly become more accessible and human.
Rathbone: Yeah, they started off with Nosferatu and Dracula in the ’20s and ’30s and then saw this huge leap with Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire. I love the book and the film. Really, vampires help us explore our humanity in different ways, and they put a face on our desires to live more exotic lives, to feel more deeply. It’s interesting that as the ages have fallen and technology has brought us closer together, we’ve been putting an increasingly human face on our monsters. That’s what the arts do; help us put our deepest fears and anxieties and hopes and dreams on display so we can work through them. That’s what Dread is all about.
Fang: Clive Barker has seen some extraordinary adaptions of his writing recently. Midnight Meat Train was criminally under-marketed and Dread has a similar idea; facing the unfaceable and the way it changes us. That seems to tap into the zeitgeist pretty heavily.
Rathbone: I would say so. Of course, that sort of stuff has always been around. Look at Dostoevsky and Notes From The Underground or Kafka. It’s a way of looking at the psyche, at how our choices shape who we become. Selfishness or righteousness and the difference they make and whether we are willing to become a conscious part of the process.
Fang: That certainly brings up the question of what the nature of dread is. Is it just biological? Or does it point us toward something other than that, like the idea of a soul?
Rathbone: Spirituality is something inherent in everyone, the sense of what we believe, what our tribe believes. I like to equate human emotional traits at their most basic level. At their most primal emotions seem to boil down to love and fear. But that stuff is buried, even for people who approach sprituality in an organized way. It has to do with how we talk about it. That’s why I love doing a lot of different creative things because it brings me into collaboration with others, and we draw on that stuff.
Fang: Are you going to keep working in fantastic film?
Rathbone: Ideas aren’t things I like to say no to. I have gotten other horror scripts that I’ve decided to pass on for some reasons or another, but I’m certainly open. Twilight is not really a horror film, it has vampires in it, but it’s more of a romantic action piece. Dread has horrific elements, but I’m not sure it qualifies as pure horror. It’s so based in reality, the horror is inside the characters. That’s what appealed to me most about it. It was a story worth telling. That’s why I love to make movies, make art, why I’m involved in music.
Fang: With things going so well right now, have you had the chance to think about the instability of the business? What happens when Jackson Rathbone isn’t as in demand as he is right now?
Rathbone: That’s a great question. When I was 14 I was in Grease, and that was when I fell in love with music and acting. I actually quit the football team to pursue drama which wasn’t a popular decision with a lot of my friends. I understand what it’s like to not be “in demand.” In fact, I understand what it’s like to be a little bit of a pariah! And when I went to LA, I was by myself, busting on Venice Beach, just trying to make money. There was certainly no demand for me [laughs]. I definitely remember the days when it was hard to get in a casting director’s door. It might be a different game now, but it’ll just keep changing. It’ll be a new game. My goal is to keep doing what I love and to surround myself with other artists who are like minded. Kurt Vonnegut talked about that. He said you have to surround yourself with people who cause you to be a better person and a better artist. Your life and your art have to feed into one another for you to enjoy both.
Do men and women ever want the same thing? We asked the cast of this month’s blockbuster, New Moon, to spill the beans on love, sex and relationships.
We’ve spent months anticipating New Moon, the next installment in the Twilight saga, the hit vampire franchise that’s taken the world by storm. While Bella may have fallen for brooding Edward, it’s his gorgeous, gifted vampire siblings that we’re loving. GLAMOUR jetted to Vancouver to catch up with Ashley Greene, 22, who plays future-seeing Alice Cullen, Jackson Rathbone, 24, who plays her boyfriend Jasper Hale, Nikki Reed, 21, the sassy Rosalie Hale and delicious jock Kellan Lutz, 23, who plays Emmett Cullen. Sink your teeth into this!
How do you differentiate between love and lust?
KELLAN: The first six months are always exciting, but then things can get boring. So if that lustful feeling never really goes, then you know it’s real.
ASHLEY: When things that used to annoy you turn into things you adore about somebody, you know something has changed.
NIKKI: We over-use the word “love”: “I love tacos, I love shoes.” We “love” a lot of things, but don’t “lust” a lot of things. I’m in a movie revolving around this obsession with love, and I think people should find more of an obsession with lust.
JACKSON: Lust tastes like tequila and love tastes like whiskey. Love burns for longer and warms you up on the inside and sometimes it makes you do stupid things. Tequila makes you wasted. You can get wasted on lust and warmed by love.
Body hair: discuss…
KELLAN: I do have chest hair and if I’m doing some young teeny magazine it’s nice to look young, so I shave it off. But I’ve never waxed, I wouldn’t go there.
NIKKI: I’m a massive fan of body hair – if men shave any part of their body I’m completely turned off.
JACKSON: I wish I could have more stubble. For New Moon I have to shave every day and I’d rather let it grow, live in the mountains somewhere and shave with an axe!
ASHLEY: Facial hair on a guy looks great but it hurts when you kiss. A little chest hair is manly, but I’m not one for the back hair!
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Which of the New Moon cast would you choose to help in fight?
Nikki: Jackson
Kellan: None. I wouldn’t need the help in a fight!
Ashley: Kellan
Jackson: Nikki
Which member of the cast would you get to style you?
Nikki: Kellan
Kellan: Alex Meraz, who plays one of the werewolves, has good style.
Ashley: Rachelle Lefevre, although Kristen and I have the same taste in jeans
Jackson: Ashley
Who in the cast would you go to for relationship advice?
Kellan: Ashley Greene. We’re very close and it’s great to have someone especially as you work with them, just to talk to for advice.
Nikki: Elizabeth Reaser. She has a good head on her shoulders
Ashley: I ask Kellan a lot about guys because he’s honest with me and she’s new but Bryce Dallas Howard is really nurturing and kind of motherly.
Jackson: Peter Facinelli. He’s got a wife, kids, beautiful home. That’s gorgeous. Someday hopefully, I’m taking tips from him.
Is it intimidating playing a character that’s already loved by so many people?
It is intimidating. It also adds a lot of fun to it. There’s so much out there that fans have done with fan fiction, a lot of their abilities with photoshop. It’s incredible the amount of stuff they’ve put out there. For me, and I know a lot of the other castmates as well have read up on our characters and have read these fan fiction pieces. Pretty much everything they feel about these characters we feel about them now as well. I really appreciate it.
What do you like best about playing Jasper?
Jasper is very conservative in a lot of ways, in terms of how he projects himself around humans, because he’s not comfortable around humans yet. It’s a lot of fun to play someone on the verge of breaking because you have to hold back and it’s interesting because there’s always something going on with Jasper. He’s trying to become a good vampire. He’s at a place where most of the other vampires, in terms of the Cullen family, have already gone through it and he’s kind of that weird missing link between James and Dr. Cullen, I feel.
Transcript from the recent interview with Jackson at the 100 Monkeys gig at Backstage Lounge, Vancouver. The conversation is mumbled in some parts, but this is the bulk of it!
Interviewer: You been having a lot of fun with the cast yet?
Jackson: Yeah, man…
Interviewer: Party every night?
Jackson: Party, dude… We have a lot of work to do…
Love the guys of Twilight? Check out this exclusive interview where they open up about everything from dating to their food addictions.
Identity Theft
“I stay away from Facebook and MySpace. Whenever I go out with a friend, they’re like ‘I didn’t know you had a MySpace.’ I don’t have a MySpace. There’s actually three MySpaces for Jackson Rathbone. I don’t know who these people are but they’re not me!”
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We caught up with Jackson Rathbone right before Twilight hit theaters. Here’s what he had to say…
TEEN: In the movie they never talk about Jasper’s vampire abilities. Why?
Jackson: Well it doesn’t really come out too much in the book. It’s one of those things were it’s understood but in the third book it really comes out like the back story and everything. I think one of the things we didn’t want to get too much into was focusing on all the other vampires. We wanted really to establish this relationship and how she (Bella) gets sucked into the world of the Cullen family and once she’s in the world that’s when things kind of start coming out.
One of the things about Jasper is he doesn’t use the ability all the time. It’s something that he’s very strict about using because it’s like an invasion of privacy to make someone feel something, to manipulate emotions.
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Jackson Rathbone (‘Jasper’) plays a vampire who has the ability to manipulate emotions in the big screen adaptation of Twilight, the bestselling book by Stephenie Meyer. At Twilight‘s Los Angeles premiere – surrounded by hundreds of fans who didn’t stop screaming for three hours – Rathbone talked about Meyer’s take on vampire mythology.
So we don’t really see his special powers in this one.
Jackson Rathbone: “Oh no.”
Q. Peter can you talk about your look in this movie…the physical transformation.
Peter Facinelli: We did like a week of testing all the different kinds of makeup. The makeup team was phenomenal and the actors were very patient. We worked it out. But they had some kind of gadget from Japan and it was like an ionizer and it was weird because, as they put the makeup on you, if they touched you, you would get shocked. It was one of the those things were you had to be very careful but, then again, it was early in the morning so if you did get shocked, it kind of woke you up a little bit. The makeup was part of the transformation. For me it was blonde in a bottle. That took a good day at the salon.
Jackson Rathbone, 23, plays Jasper Cullen, Alice’s vampire love, who has a strong conscience. Rathbone had the lead role on the television series Beautiful People and a part on The O.C.
VF Daily: Had you read the “Twilight” books before getting the script?
Jackson Rathbone: No, but many friends of mine had and filled me in on the story. Then I read Twilight and I saw what all the fuss was about. Once I landed the role of Jasper, all my cousins wrote me—I have a huge family—and told me how excited they were that I was in the movie because they loved the books so much.
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