KATARA
Played by Nicola Peltz
Where You’ve Seen Her: Mackenzie in Deck the Halls
Character Insight: “I’m waterbender from the Southern water tribe. If you are waterbending, you have to imagine the water in your hand and Night really wants you to have emotion when you do the moves. You aren’t just doing moves, because if you lose concentration then the water can just drop. You have to have 100% focus. In the movie Master Pakku says, “Let your emotions flow like water.” I learned Kung fu is a force against force, and Tai Chi, which is waterbending, is using another person’s force against themselves.”

SOKKA
Played by Jackson Rathbone
Where You’ve Seen Him: Jasper Hale in The Twilight Saga
Character Insight: “Originally I auditioned about two years ago for Zuko so I got to meet with Night a year ago for that role. But then they called me back in to read for Sokka. It was a pleasant surprise because I really like doing comedy. I have that range with this character and he grows a lot throughout the series. I did a chemistry read with Nicola and Noah. It was amazing when we all got together it felt right. One of the main themes of this film is family. You have the good side with Katara and Sokka who are so connected to each other as brother and sister they would do anything for one another. And then they bring Aang into their family because he has no family and they go off on this quest to save the world. Then you have Zuko, who isn’t really a bad guy but in a bad situation trying to get his family back together. It’s the opposite spectrum of family. It’s a beautiful theme.”

UNCLE IROH
Played by Shaun Toub
Where You’ve Seen Him: Rahim Khan in The Kite Runner
Character Insight: “I play Uncle Iroh who I believe is the spiritual compass of the movie. He is the man who truly believes the world needs to stay in balance in order for us to survive. It’s interesting because I think it relates to our lives these days. He truly believes that by applying your power to conquer others it comes back and hurts you in the future because it causes the world to go out of balance. He is an ex general so he has seen a lot. He used to be a warrior. Surprisingly, he is very powerful but he doesn’t show it at all. He lost a son and now he is content with life. He believes life is to be enjoyed. His nephew Zuko has become like a son to him so he tries to keep an eye on him.

ZUKO
Played by Dev Patel
Where You’ve Seen Him: Jamal Malik in Slumdog Millionaire
Character Insight: “I’m firebender and I control fire. I can manipulate the element and use it to fight with in combat. The great thing about this film and why I wanted to do it is that you can express the way you’re feeling with the way you fight. A lot of this is physical acting and there’s a couple of fight scenes where I fight Noah, who plays the avatar, and the dynamic with that is so different, because I’m fighting with aggression. I’m trying to catch this kid and hurt him and damage him, whereas he’s trying to neutralize me because he’s a monk. If I’m upset, you see that in the way I spar with the people on my ship. Fire is an element you associate with venom and aggression. It’s unpredictable, and that’s really it in a nutshell. He’s unpredictable. He’s a firecracker, Zuko.”

COMMANDER ZHAO
Played by Aasif Mandvi
Where You’ve Seen Him: Dr. Kency Dhuwalia in Jericho
Character Insight: “Whenever you play a villain, you can’t play a villain. You have to play him with a certain point of view. For me, Zhao has a very specific point of view. It may be warped and you may disagree with him, but his point of view makes sense to him and within the universe and the world he is looking at. I think Zhao believes he isn’t doing anything villainous. He is doing things to protect the world that he sees needs protecting and he believes that he and the Fire Nation are the only people that can protect the world in that way.

It refers to the power that characters have to literally bend the air to their will; making it flow, rush like a wind, blow like a force.

How, exactly, do you depict airbending?

“Even though it’s called The Last Airbender, we had to do airbending, and … nobody really knew what that was going to look like,” Pablo Helman, the film’s visual effects supervisor, told a group of reporters visiting Industrial Lights & Magic headquarters in San Francisco in early April. “If it was going to be smoky or if it was going to distort the background. We also wanted to go away from the derivative kind of things.”

Ultimately, the effects people decided not to depict it at all. Rather, they depicted its effect: Blowing clouds of dust, whooshes of fog or smoke that happened to be there, rippling nearby water.

The solution reflects ILM’s approach to the film’s other massive effects, which include bending of fire, water, and earth, as well as creation of mystical creatures such as the enormous six-legged white furry “Sky Bison” named Appa or the flying lemur-like Momo. And that was: Do something you haven’t seen before. Helman and a team of 300 visual-effects artists came up with the movie’s magical fantasy sequences over months and years of pre-production, filming and post-production.

“We basically had to design and figure out what bending is for fire and water and air and earth, and it was kind of a journey of discovery that the director and us took together, it was really, really very challenging, very difficult work,” Helman said.

We previewed some of the effects at ILM. We watched footage of various character – Aang (Noah Ringer), Katara (Nicola Peltz), and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) – manipulating the various elements. In one scene, Firebenders jure swirling columns of flame that arc and slam against the ground, or balls of fire that are propelled like bombs. Katara summons a spinning, dripping ball of water, which hovers in midair; other characters direct streams of water that freeze instantly into ice. A man conjures a block of earth out of the ground, which solidifies into a wall. And Aang, twirling in a martial-arts kata, shoots blasts of air at approaching enemies.

In all, Helman says the challenge was making the effects look and feel real. “M. Night’s aesthetic is different in the sense that he wanted the show to look realistic,” Helman says. “So how do you make it look really realistic and then make it behave in a completely different way? I mean if you really think about how we as people judge if something is real, it’s two things: It’s the way things look and the way things behave. So we can make it look like fire, but if it behaves in a specific way, you’re going to say, well that doesn’t look real. So it’s kind of a very, very fine line in understanding what is it that makes it look real.”

Compounding the challenge: Shymalan’s demanding eye. In particular, the director didn’t like the idea of computer-generated fire because he said it always looked fake. This wasn’t helped when Helman and his team showed Shyamalan test footage of real fire caught in an updraft: The director said even the actual flames looked fake.

“We did have to develop new techniques and new software and hardware to do things, like for instance bending fire and bending water,” Helman said. He adds: “I think fire and water were the most difficult ones because, again,… of how familiar we are with fire and how Night wanted these elements to look completely realistic. … Sometimes we’d do, say, 60 or 70 takes on a [visual-effects] shot. … And then earth was difficult also, because it was all particle work. And then air, we had to all kind of discover it.’

One things safe to say: You haven’t seen anything like this before.

So what’s an auteur to do?

Taking a page from the George Lucas handbook (one of Night’s biggest cinematic influences), Night decided it was high time to make his epic. Startling yes, but perhaps even more surprising is that Night ventured outside of his notebook of ideas and perused the potential of others’ imaginations.

“I was trying to do a long-form movie, one that you could do over two or three movies with a long mythology,” Night says of his search, “I was toying with a lot of the franchises and thinking about them. I never found the one that was the perfect match, where I could say something about myself. I’m not good at disappearing into a movie. That’s not my thing, but I would love to find out where my accent is complementary to the piece so it feels like its true and it’s told with this thick accent that I have. The best thing that happened was that it wasn’t an agenda or anything like that. I had been looking, agents were looking, and I was offered these other franchises but this one came from my own family in the kitchen.”

“This one” is The Last Airbender, based on Nickelodeon’s successful anime series Avatar: The Last Airbender created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko. In a series of three books (seasons), the series told the story of a fantastical world separated into nations to represent the four elements: Air, Water, Earth, and Fire. After existing peacefully for ages, the Fire Nation decides to overthrow the other nations with a brutal campaign of genocide. Over the of a century, the entire world is nearly decimated by war. But hope is revived with the discovery of Aang, the ancient Avatar, who is destined to unite all the tribes once more. Frozen in ice for a century, Aang looks like a little bald 12-year-old, but in reality he is the last Airbender from the Air Nation. He is the only human that can harness the powers of each element to restore balance to the ravaged world. So he bands together with the brother and sister that found him – Katara, a waterbender, and light hearted Sokka – and embark on a journey to save their world.

Night explains that it was his two children who actually brought the property to his attention. “We saw the cartoon, and the mythology was so well thought out. It had Buddhism, martial arts, and CGI, but the kind that is character based and that’s coming from emotions. It’s very entertaining… but underneath there is something serious that talks about the genocide and balance and connection to the planet – all those things that interest me in other movies that I have made. It felt like an important movie.

Night says he’s gone to his kids a lot for some key decision making. He laughs, “In my whole career my family has been on set maybe four hours total. On this movie, they piratically live here. They really dig it. Once I asked them if we really needed Momo [Aang's winged-lemur pal] and they practically killed me when I suggested that at the dinner table. And I’ll ask if things are too scary, but my kids are the wrong ones to ask about scary because they always want scary, scary, scary. But they set in at dailies sometimes and laugh or ooh and ahh over  stunt like Aang taking off.”

He continues, “But otherwise, I kept the idea that one of the cultures is in an industrial revolution and they are losing their way from their believe system. The Fire Nation decided they don’t need to follow the old theories and it’s primitive thinking to think about God that way – we don’t use the word God in the movie – but to think about higher powers that way and they can make their own machines and their own gods. It’s subtle in the piece but that is the conflict of our movie – a moment where everyone decided to forget the truths.”

It also met the emotional and thematic criteria of what Night considers the seminal cinematic series, Star Wars. With an unapologetic grin, Night says, “Basically Star Wars was like religion to me. That’s the only way I can relate to people who are totally into religion is when I think about Star Wars. I remember how I felt about that… that shit is real! The Force is real! It was significant. It was like if you had some seminal event in your life; that was it for me at seven years old. I just got it on every level it was intended. Those archetypes are stuck in my head, as they are in so many people’s heads. Obviously, the creators of Airbender were very influenced as well. It has that kind of journey inside of it so it reminded me of it.

Passionate about a mythology that he could seek his teeth into, Night then set about creating Aang’s world in the dilapidated warehouses of suburban Philadelphia. In the brick confines of a decaying automotive factory about 10 miles outside of the city, the production enlisted more than 600 craftsman, techies, and designers to fill literally every corner of the massive warehouse with lush sets that look plucked from the best museums of the world.

Last June, in a very unexpected move, the usually secretive Shyamalan invited a small group of journalists to see how his epic was shaping up. Obviously proud of the work going on around him inside the warehouse draped in green screen, the director references the impressive gigantic bow of a Fire Nation war ship built behind us and then the live set of the intricate Northern Air Temple, where he’s blocking a fight scene with the star (and Night’s discovery), Noah Ringer.

An utterly charming 12-year-old from Texas, Ringer was selected from an open casting call for both his martial arts powess and striking resemblance to Aang. Both sport bald heads, unusual for pre-teens, but Ringer says he’s had his for three years. “Since I have been shaving my head everybody has been calling me Aang,” he laughs, “And then everyone said, ‘You have to watching this cartoon. You look just like him!’”

A black belt in Taekwondo, Ringer does all of his own fight scenes and choreography in the film which he loves. “In this movie the martial arts are more about performance; because of the bending I don’t actually have to make contact with anybody.” But he says the sequences have been extremly intricate and he’s had to shift from his Taekwondo practice to Wushu for Aang’s Airbender style, “Wushu is a lot of fluidity and then pow,” he explains. “Taekwondo is force against force. Wushu is using your opponent’s energy against them. But once you know the technique it’s just learning how to put those techniques into a different order. The hardest sequence it took about 15 to 20 minutes to learn.

While Ringer even teaches a bit back at his Texas dojo, he admits acting is brand new to him. However, he’s remarkably unfazed about the whole movie riding on his shoulders. “After I got the party they said I would go to an acting school for a month and then I would come and start filming,” he says matter-of-factly. “I learned how to focus and move your emotions around and show your emotions.”

Ringer runs back on set and Night gets asked how much is changed from the cartoon series to the film, “I took away a little bit of the slap-sticky stuff that was there for the little, little kids like the fart jokes and things like that,” the director explains. “We weeded that stuff away and then the other stuff came out. I grounded Katara’s brother [Sokka], who was the comedy relief, so I grounded him more, which did wonderful things for the whole tone of the movie.

As Ringer works through his choreography by himself near the camera, his co-star Dev Patel (who plays Fire Nation Prince Zuko) appears from behind him with a big hug. The two smile and laugh like real brothers even though they play mortal enemies in the film

Observing the pair, Night says he was looking for an actor like Patel who could play against his innate warmth. “Vulnerability is Zuko’s strong suit. He’s supposed to be a tough, mean guy and he does not do great things in the movie but he’s coming from a really vulnerable place. Dev’s sweet spot is his vulnerability. He showed me that in his first audition, a powerful speech talking to a little kid. At the time I was like, ‘Who is this kid in England’ I saw him as really vulnerable in that he’s too soft and that’s why his father [Fire Lord Ozai] doesn’t like him. It’s his softness at the end of the day that will be his strength at the end of the three movies. He doesn’t realize yet so he keeps trying to squash that side of him. And that’s Dev. He’s this man-child right now”

Straight off his success in Slumdog Millionaire, Patel walks over with a huge smile and explains that he was looking to tweak people’s perceptions of his just being the nice Indian kid. “I wanted to do something as distant to Slumdog as possible. I think Slumdog was an amazing role… but I didn’t want it to define me. I wanted to do something completely different and what’s more different than playing a prince of a fairy tale nation who can control fire? I wanted to stretch myself as an actor. This guy, in a nutshell, is a villain with a heart. He’s not just evil for the sake of being evil. He’s sent on this mission to capture this young boy (Aang) but the backstory is that it’s because he wants to regain his honor with his father. He’s just a child looking for love, really.”

In his blinded pursuit of acceptance, Zuko has to do some dark things over the course of the story. Patel admits, “It’s a real departure from how I am as a human being. I try to think of myself as a happy go lucky sort of guy who just loves joking around and not taking things too seriously. But then I’m playing a guy who is full of all this anger and aggression. It’s actually been a real stretch for me to get that intensity constantly.” But Patel says Zuko’s journey in particular allows the film to explore some moral ethical questions that kids can relate to and learn from. “Even thought it’s a fantastical film, I think there are some really good messages that come through in the characters. Night once said that the thing that holds these characters together and makes each person special is family, and the ones that hold family strong for themselves prevail and the ones who stand alone fail. Zuko’s a boy, and especially in his situation he’s struggling to impress his father and get his honor back and his love. But then he has his uncle Iroh [Shaun Toub] who treats him like a son. Almost like in live, you take your anger out on the people you love the most, and he sort of neglects his uncle as he’s just on this one-track mission to find this Aang. It makes it really interesting.”

As we walk through more and more impressive sets, from a monastery with columns of bronze prayer wheels waiting to be spun to an ice chasm with a beautiful cherry blossom tree at its heart, its settles in that The Last Airbender is perhaps teaching more in its production to both cast and crew than ever expected.

Night all but confirms when he admits, “It’s been such a great growing experience for me as a director and a human being because I am a complete control freak. I feel like a little bit of pain when I look at a frame and it’s not right and I have to correct it. This has taught me there are just so many factors going on; it’s doing two and a half times a [normal] movie of mine so it made me go back a little bit and become a student. Any time you can become a student again, that’s the way to do it. You learn again and you are open about everything, I feel like I’ve become a much better filmmaker because I have had to go through this process. It’s overwhelming.” With a dangerous smile he adds with glee, “I am scared to death.”

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.

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!

What’s the one thing you find irresistible?
KELLAN: Confidence. That’s so sexy to me. I also love a girl who’s switched on, like she knows how to book an airline ticket and get the cheapest one.
NIKKI: Men who are smarter than me. I don’t find too manly, but I’m really open to learning.
ASHLEY: Talent. The second you see someone in their element they instantly become sexy.
JACKSON: Watching a girl get lost in music. Especially the piano or the cello. If I walked in on a girl playing the cello I might have to go buy new pants!

What are your relationship deal-breakers?
NIKKI: Lying. I’m really good at catching people in their lies. If you try to dupe me, you’ll know about it.
KELLAN: Relationships last when you can be yourself and don’t have to be ashamed of something the other person might hate.
JACKSON: I don’t do the whole “other guy” thing, when girls say they’ve got a boyfriend but it’s almost over. Single girls only. I don’t do groups. Maybe in bed, but not in any other aspect of life!
Ashley: I don’t like it when guys try to impress me. Like, “Look what I know, like what I can do.” Don’t say it, do it.

What will you never compromise on?
KELLAN: Someone questioning my friends. I have people in my life for different reasons. I don’t expect you to be friends with all my friends, but don’t tell me who I can and can’t be friends with.
JACKSON: My music. You can lose relationships because you spend long hours playing, but it’s serious stuff. Sometimes women don’t get that.
ASHLEY: Space. You need space in a relationship. I’m a real “I’m going out with the girls, you’re going out with the guys” type of girl.
NIKKI: My independence. I wouldn’t ever want to give up work, my friends or my own place.

Do you believe in soulmates?
ASHLEY: Gosh, I hope so. I’m a strong believer in chemistry – it has nothing to do with what you want, just how your chemicals react with each other.
KELLAN: I believe that there are three people that could be potential soulmates. You’ll find one and won’t realize until afterward. Then hopefully another will come when the time is right.
JACKSON: I believe that we have a destiny, but sometimes people go their entire lives without finding their soulmates. There’s got to be a couple of options though.
NIKK: I believe in multiple. People are born with this desire to connect, that’s why with girls the line is blurry – is it a friends, is it a relationship?

How do you get over a break up?
ASHLEY: I’m the type who immediately says, “I’m alright,” and then three months later I deal with it. It’s taken me a year to get over someone before, but because of the pride thing I could never go back.
JACKSON: I like going to bars alone and finding groups of people that are having fun and joining in. You hang out with strangers, no questions asked.
KELLAN: I’m a relationship guy, so I’m usually in it to fall in live. If we break up for a reason, I want to fix it. It’s worse if someone cheats because then I’m pissed off, but I’d rather lose love than not love at all.
NIKK:  I remember my first break-up. I literally thought my life was over. Then you realize, it’s like a cut – these might be a scar, but the pain will go away.

How can someone tell if you’re into them?
NIKKI: I say it. I just like it when you say, “I like you, do you like me too? Shall we keep talking?”
KELLAN: DI don’t say it, especially if I’m really attracted to them. I can get shy. But it’s funny – when you’re not super-flirty with a girl and act a bit cool, she’ll usually be more interested!
ASHLEY: I like to see people smile. So if you notice little things being done, it means I care. Like with gifts, it’s easy to give a bottle of wine, but I’d prefer to search for something personal or remember something they liked.
JACKSON: I’ll look down at my boots, bu hands will go in my pockets and I’ll be shifting back and forth. When I’m talking to a girl I like, I usually look awkward so that could be a sign!

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.

Which member of the cast would you get to cook dinner?
Nikki: Peter Facinelli
Kellan: Ashley
Ashley: Peter Facinelli – he always says he’s cooked too much and invites us round to eat it!
Jackson: Peter Facinelli

Which member of the cast would you like to be stuck on desert island with?
Nikki: Kristen Stewart
Kellan: Ashley
Ashley: Jackson
Jackson: Ashley

Which member of the cast would you like to get drunk with?
Nikki: I don’t drink
Kellan: Jackson
Ashley: Jackson
Jackson: Rob Pattinson – we used to go to a bar and do open mikes together

Who would you go for a shoulder to cry on?
Nikki: Elizabeth Reaser
Kellan: Ashley
Ashley: My Eclipse co-star Bryce Dallas Howard
Jackson: Nikki

Who would you have a one night stand with?
Nikki: Elizabeth!
Kellan: Bella’s Mum (actress Sarah Clark)
Ashley: Can I say Jackson again? Although I don’t have one night stands!
Jackson: Elizabeth

Which is the gender cliché that you’re embarrassed to say you succumb to?
Nikki: I actually really enjoy putting on make-up, not because I think I look better, but I really like art and painting.
Kellan: Football, sport in general. Although I have a lot of female friends who are into football just as much as me, that’s why I love hanging out with the girls, they get so into it and that’s sexy to me.
Jackson: I can’t clean. I really can’t, I’m not very good at it, I’m actually a poor cleaner. My level of cleanliness is far below most, I wear the same pants every day, I get at least 2-3 wearings out of my socks. Not in a row – they sit in my dirty pile.
Ashley: My dog is spoilt, I buy him clothes. I love girl movies and girl wine. I definitely get very excited over clothes, like really excited.

What’s the gender cliché you go against?
Nikki: I like clothes if I’m handed them, I don’t like shopping. I get bored really easily, like having to go through things and looking through racks. I’d much rather eat than shop.
Kellan: I am the worst at packing. If I’m going to the beach, it’ll take me like an hour to pack my stuff like my towels, bathing suits and games.
Jackson: I’m not into sports. I used to play a lot of baseball as a kid but I’ve never followed it I was always much more into art.
Ashley: I’m a real college football girl and I like hockey games. They’re really brutal but I enjoy them. I was a tomboy when I was growing up, I climbed trees and stuff.

Source.

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.

What was it like when you first met the rest of the cast?
It was great. I happened to have already known Kellan for some time. Kellan and I are good friends. Ashley is just one of the easiest girls to get along with – sweetest person in the world. Miss Nikki Reed is probably one of my favorite people. I’ve been playing a lot of music with her. The girl’s got an incredible raw ability to write songs. We started writing some music together back at the hotel and since then she’s kept it up and we did a little recording session back in LA. Peter Facinelli is Dr. Cullen. He’s the most compassionate guy. He took Nikki and I out for Indian food once. I had never eaten Indian food and I had no idea what to order so he helped us out. He’s a great guy. Elizabeth Reaser as Esme is also an incredibly sweet girl. She was so sweet to us. We had a family unit. Everybody kind of played a part. We’re all extremely different, but that’s kind of how all families are, but we all come together. Rob and I have been playing a lot of music together, with Kristen as well. Kristen also plays the guitar. It was a very musical cast. We were always hanging out and playing. Good times!

How would you describe your own music?
Oh, eclectic – very! It depends on which band you’re talking about. (Laughs) There’s my solo work which is all rhythms basically, blues or Southern rock, or funky blues I’d say. I mainly play guitar or harmonica and then I’ll add a little banjo, mandolin or yukelele. I play a lot of folk instruments. And then with my band it’s called 100 Monkeys and it’s all improvised music. It’s one hundred percent one take, one track, no redos, just jamming and singing and making it up as we go. It’s my roommate and I and we’re both actors and musicians and songwriters so we’ve always done a lot of improv so we took a little bit of the theatrical improv and rock ‘n roll and put it together.

Do you ever find the acting roles you have influence the songs you write?
Oh definitely. It’s nice to being able to go out on location and be in a different city, in a different environment and with different people and that really influences how I wrote. With Twilight I was playing a very visceral, angry, kinda silent character so I  was writing much more music during that time than I was lyrically, but I pumped out probably a good 12 songs while I was in Portland.

How did you discover the rest of the costars were into music?
Well, I never go anywhere without bringing my guitar. I suppose I project that I’m a musician because I’m walking around with my guitar at all times. A couple of the other cast members would say, “Oh, you play guitar? I play guitar!” I’d just kind of hand off the guitar to Rob and he’d show me some of the stuff he’s playing and working on and writing and Kristen is a pretty phenomenal guitarist. She played in the movie Into the Wild so I actually knew she was a musician before. With Nikki she kind of discovered she was a songwriter. She was pretty modest when she talked about music. She said she’s just been dabbling in songwriting and learning to play the guitar. Oh yeah, she’s learning to play the guitar and she started a lot of songwriting in Portland. We worked on some stuff together and she’s just so fantastic to work with. She’s sweet and she knows what she wants and she has a really great take on the way music and lyrics and the vocals and melodies follow one another. I think musicians kind of sniff each other out real quick.

Are there any quirks you can reveal about any of the cast?
We’re all very outgoing. We’re all quirky in different ways. Like Kellan, for instance, he’s this big jock looking guy but if you sit down and talk to the guy for more than five minutes you understand that the guy has a lot more going on inside his head. He’s a real smart kid. He kept talking a lot about haiku books and old Japanese haiku artists. I suppose would be the appropriate terminology. We’ve all got a lot of different things going on in terms of not just being actors.

Since Twilight is a guilty pleasure for so many people, what’s your personal guilty pleasure?
Bad television – any kind of reality show, I guess. I don’t have cable or even basic cable hooked up in my house because if there’s any sort of television, I will watch it.

It seems like you really keep yourself busy – between the Twilight saga and a lot of indie movies!
It’s the only thing I know how to do. If I’m not busy I’m bored and I can’t stand being bored. If I’m not acting I’m playing music. If I’m not playing music then I’m acting. And if I’m not doing either then, whew, I’m probably dead! That would be a bad day.

Jackson: Hello?

Ily (Interviewer): Hello, is this Jackson?

Jackson: Yes it is Jackson.

Ily: Hi Jackson, this is Ily from Volvocast, the Brazilian ‘Twilight’ podcast.

Jackson: Ohh hello, how are you doing?

Ily: I’m fine, and you?

Jackson: I’m doing well, doing well, had a good New Year’s, how was yours?

Ily: Oh it was great, thank you! Oh, Happy New Year, by the way!

Jackson: Happy New Year! Happy 2009.

Ily: Thank you. Ok, before we start, I just have to say that I really appreciate you taking this time, and that Jasper is my favourite character in the Twilight series; so it’s really an honour to be speaking with you.

Jackson: Oh, thank you so much, I really appreciate that.

Ily: Ok, as I told you, our show is called Volvocast, so my first question is – Have you ever driven a Volvo?

Jackson: A Volvo? I haven’t… Or maybe I have? I’m not sure. I drive a lot of my friend’s cars just for fun.

Ily: Oh nice! Awesome.

Jackson: I don’t, myself, have a Volvo, no.

Ily: Ok, that’s fine. How has your life changed after Twilight?

Jackson: Oh, it hasn’t changed too much. I get recognised a little bit, here and there. Coming home was a lot of fun. A lot of my friends were finally able to see my work, and that’s nice for my friends and family to be able to, you know, see me doing what I love to do (mumbled) It’s been good.

Ily: That’s great. Well there has been some rumours about New Moon and Eclipse being filmed together next year, do you know anything about it?

Jackson: Oh, I don’t know quite anything about that just yet, but I believe we’re going to get started on New Moon in March, so its coming up here pretty soon, and that’ll be a lot of fun, to be able to get them both out as quick as possible.

Ily: Great. We know that Jasper doesn’t get a lot of screen time in New Moon, but he’s crucial for Edward’s decision to leave Bella. Are you looking forward to filming that scene?

Jackson: Oh I am, very much so. I’ve been looking forward to it ever since I read that part of the book, and it’s just uh, ingrained in my mind of who Jasper is, and finally he breaks. All that guilt, you know, that immediate guilt, and uh yeah, I’m very excited – I’ve been thinking about that scene a lot.

Ily: Oh great – me too. What other scenes in the next movies are you most excited to film?

Jackson: Oh well, uh, I think all of it. It’s going to be interesting, getting into the werewolves, and kind of seeing how that transformation takes place, and what they do. I think it’s going to be amazing.

Ily: Uh, we checked your playlist on iTunes, and realised that you have a song from a Brazilian band in it – ‘A Minha Menina’ by Os Mutantes.

Jackson: Os Mutantes?

Ily: Yes.

Jackson: Ah ok, yes, I do love that song, I’ve got to admit, so… fantastic. I originally heard it as a cover by another, a different band, called A Band Of Bees, they covered that song, and I looked into the song, and a friend told me that Os Mutantes did it and it was better, and uh…it was.

Ily: Yeah they’re a great band.

Jackson: Original’s always better.

Ily: Yes, I agree. Um ok, there were lots of screaming girls at the Twilight Premiere in November, and Robert Pattinson says that he’s always uncomfortable when people are screaming like that. How do you feel about it?

Jackson: It’s a little bit unnerving, but at the same time it’s nice to see that there’s so much support. These girls, you know, and all these fans, boy and girl fans alike. We got women and men too! They all love it, they all really love it – and to see that love and appreciation for a piece of art that we’re doing, it’s really inspiring. If it can reach that many people, there’s something to it.

Ily: Have you always known you wanted to be an actor, or did you just wake up one day and say ‘Hey, I’m going to act!’

Jackson: Well, uh, my sisters, when I was young, they did theatre, and so I was bored and my parents said ‘You should go do theatre. I said no. I ended up joining the acting troupe building sets, I was kind of a set mover behind the scenes in theatre shows. Then after a year of that, I kind of was interested in trying out to be on stage myself and so I auditioned for one of the plays and I got in, and I kind of fell in love with it right then. Well I was really young, I was probably about 14 at that point and I always loved the theatre and right then at that moment I was like ‘Oh, this is what I want to do.’

Ily: Awesome. For you, what is the best part of being an actor?

Jackson: The best part, I’d say, of being an actor, would probably be the ability to kind of walk in someone else’s shoes. You know, get in someone else’s mindset, to experience something extreme, or you know, to experience all these different emotions and have the licence to do it, and to play characters. I always loved make-believe I suppose.

Ily: Great. Can you tell us a little bit about your character in ‘Dread’?

Jackson: Oh, my character in ‘Dread’? Yeah… His name’s Stephen Grace, he’s a film student and he’s kind of an outcast, but self-imposed. He doesn’t really, you know, make an effort to talk to anybody, he kind of has a really solitary life, but he wants to make documentaries. Another guy comes in – Quaid – with the idea of making a documentary about fear, you know, people’s deepest dread. Then Stephen gets pushed to the limit a lot of times, they all do. It’s a really, kind of… it starts off almost like a Kinsey study of fear, and then it gets into this really kind of dark, uh… well, it’s been compared to ‘Saw’ I think. So yeah, it gets a little dark at times, but it was fun. It was a lot of fun to do, Anthony DiBlasi is an amazing director, and we just had so much fun filming that movie, and I think it’s going to make people feel something.

Ily: Great. Do you have any funny stories? While you were filming it?

Jackson: Hey, funny stories? Well, um, there was a couple of things but, you know like, behind the scenes, just having some fun with the other cast members. The first night, we all got together and did a big read through, we had a pizza party while we read through all the script, and the script is very heavy, it’s very dark at times, so we had to add some levity and make it a little fun, and we read the script in funny accents. We were kind of like, making stuff up and using weird voices, eating pizza. Just having a good old time, you know?

Ily: Yeah, very good. There has been some rumours, Jackson, that you might have a role in a movie called ‘The Last Airbender’. Is it true?

Jackson: Oh, well, um… I can’t really say anything yet. It’s kind of um… I am working on some pretty heavy negotiations for another franchise, yes. I can’t really say any more than that, you know? I have to be a little coy, I’m sorry.

Ily: Ok, well, good luck with that. Do you have any big plans for 2009, besides filming New Moon and releasing a CD with your band?

Jackson: Well, uh, those are our biggest plans right now. We’re really focussed on the band right now – we’re going to be in the studio all of January, recording, so we’re going to have something out real soon, and we’re probably going to release a little ‘tribute to the fans’ EP coming out even sooner. Some old completely improvised music that we put up on our myspace (www.myspace.com/these100monkeys) that people have been listening to. We’ve been getting wonderful feedback (mumbles) and then we’re going to get another EP out. So we’re going to be trying to pump out as much music as possible, which is going to be a lot of fun. 100 Monkeys is a huge part of my life, it’s a passion, a definite passion.

Ily: It’s a great band, I love it.

Jackson: Oh, thank you!

Ily: Could you tell Brazil a little bit about 100 Monkeys, because not many people here know it… yet.

Jackson: Oh no? Well we would love to come down to Brazil and play. We have a couple, we saw on our myspace page, we have a few Brazilian fans that leave comments saying ‘Come to Brazil’ and we definitely hope we can do that sometime. Maybe, you know, if we get enough requests we can go there in the summer!

Ily: Oh, I’ll work on that for you!

Jackson: Oh thank you, that’d be fantastic!

Ily: Ok well, I know the next question is a stupid question, but people would kill me if I didn’t ask you this, so I apologise in advance. A while ago in our podcast, we were talking about stupid questions, and the other hosts, my friends, they asked me what I’d ask you if I ever got the chance to interview you, and I was joking around and I said that I would ask you who your favourite Power Ranger is, and yeah, I’m sorry!

Jackson: Oh no, my problem is, I am familiar with the show, but I’m kind of colourblind, so I mix up the power rangers. I mix up colours all the time, so, uh, I don’t know.

Ily: Oh, you could say blue!

Jackson: Ok, can I say blue? Is that your favourite?

Ily: Yes!

Jackson: Ok, sweet! Well let’s go with blue.

Ily: Great! I told them you would say blue.

Jackson: Ok, well, I just said blue.

Ily: Great. Wonderful! Um, alright Jackson, well thank you very much, thank you for your time.

Jackson: Thank you. Well you have a wonderful 2009.

Ily: You too, and I look forward to seeing you in New Moon, and in your other films as well.

Jackson: Well, thank you very much.

Ily: Thank you, bye bye.

Jackson: Bye bye.

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…

Interviewer: Yeah that’s true. Early call times, right?

Jackson: Yeah well, what we like to do is keep everything in moderation.

Interviewer: Yeah, for sure! That was a hell of a Mohawk I saw on TV!

Jackson: Did you like that?!

Interviewer: Yeah, it was crazy! It was awesome man!

Jackson: Thank you…

Interviewer: How long does that take to put together??

Jackson: Well, uh, we have wonderful hair people on the set… (laughs) After I’m done shooting, they uh, we like to experiment, I suppose you could say.

Interviewer: You have to have fun with the situation, right? I mean…

Jackson: Exactly.

Interviewer: Can’t take it too seriously, right?

Jackson: I never take myself too seriously… I actually did most of my first introductions with everyone on the crew of New Moon, with my… my Mohawk. (laughs) It was longer than it is now.

Interviewer: Were you actually filming in Greenland recently?

Jackson: Uh, yeah, I was up in Greenland…

Interviewer: Yeah, that’s just like, a different adventure, right? You don’t hear about Greenland as a filming place very often!

Jackson: It is COLD!

Interviewer: Yeah, yeah?

Jackson: But the entire country looks like, uh, Haagen Dazs cookies and cream ice cream.

Interviewer: No way!

Jackson: I swear to God… (laughing)

Interviewer: You’re making me wanna go there!

Jackson: Yeah, you could take a spoon, and dip it into Greenland… (more laughing!)

Interviewer: Where you off to after Vancouver?

Jackson: Oh, to, um… Vancouver, then we go to Philadelphia.

Interviewer: Philly, yeah?

Jackson: I’m in Philadelphia… the rest of the film keeps shooting here. I’m doing another film right now…

(Talking over each other)

Interviewer: I also heard you earlier today when you were talking to the girl at the hotel, and you were telling her about doing a tour in Texas with the band?

Jackson: Yep, we might be shooting a little tour in Texas, coming up…

Interviewer: Is this like a national, or just in Texas type tour?

Jackson: Well, it’ll be basically just in Texas. What we’re trying to do right now is we’re trying to hit the west coast, and then we’re gonna go head to the east coast, over in like, you know, Philadelphia, we have ‘Just Sports’ Burlington (A.N. – Please note, this venue has now changed)…

Interviewer: Yeah? Must have an NYC show somewhere in there…

Jackson: Yup, we do, we do… We’re kind of keeping it all quiet now.

Interviewer: Banana man, the manager!

Interviewer: Banana man! Big plans… You got big plans cooking up for the band?

Marty: Oh, course… Going through jungles and shit like that.

Jackson: Been telling then about the east coast, like, right now, we’re going for the west coast, then we’re gonna go for the east coast.

Marty: East coast is gonna be awesome!

Jackson: East coast will be beautiful.

Marty: We got Philly, we JUST got another one, it’s all finalised now and confirmed.

Interviewer: You guys playing Brooklyn, NYC, Bowery Room or something like that?

Marty: Hopefully Brook… Hopefully Manhattan… We got a…

Jackson: Well we’re looking at it right now, what we’d honestly love to do is just basically say ‘Hey listen, two weeks, three weeks..’ We put it on our myspace, we put it to the fans, because we love playing music, but you can’t play music without people to listen to you. You know, it’s like you can’t be an actor without people to act to. You need these things, and for us, it’s like, we like to give the audience power. We like to say, ‘Hey, we wanna go play this place, it’s convenient for us to be here at this time, could you help us out?’ and that’s exactly how we do it.

Interviewer: Oh really? No way. That’s awesome.

Jackson: Our fans are amazing.

Marty: This, and the Rio Theater. We were like, well, we’re having trouble getting in touch with venues, like…

Interviewer: No one returned your call, and all of a sudden, like ‘Heyyy I booked you guys for a gig’…

Marty: I actually mentioned to another manager that I was doing cold calls to theatres and he’s like ‘Really? You actually do that??’ and I was like ‘Yeah dude, I work hard for these guys!’

Interviewer: Yeah… awesome job…

Marty: Yeah, but, umm, this, really these venues, I was like ‘Hey guys, we really wanna play Vancouver, what venues do you recommend, can you help us?’ and eventually they were like ‘Hey, we got these gigs for you’… We were like, ‘We’ll take them’.

Interviewer: Yeah, the Rio Theater is a good one for you guys.

Marty: Oh we’re really excited.

Jackson: We’re stoked.

Interviewer: It’s an all ages show, too. That’s gonna be crazy, all the kids out there.

Interviewer: Jackson, you ever wear the banana suit?

Jackson: Be careful…

Interviewer: Go to the Rio in the banana suit, come on!

Jackson: For our music video, we have a uh… Our website is in maintenance right now…

Interviewer: Yeah.

Jackson: It’s been through many hands, we haven’t been satisfied and we’re trying to work on something that has a little bit of, um you know, 100 Monkeys…

Interviewer: Websites are tough!

Marty: It is, it’s very tough…

Jackson: And none of us are computer savvy. We just play instruments and have ideas and all that.

(Talking over each other)

Jackson: like, we have ideas but we cannot do it on a computer. (laughing) So basically we’re trying to get that set up, but we’re going to have a music video that’s um…

Interviewer: You guys are all gonna be in banana suits?

All: Ahhhhhh!

Marty: Don’t know WHAT you’re talking about…

(Talking over each other)

Jackson: We have a music video to a song called ‘Slow Down’ which is on our album ‘Monster De Lux’, which is on iTunes, and it’s directed by Will Schmidt…

Interviewer: Oh ok…

Interviewer: Oh seriously?

Jackson: Yeah dude… Will SCHMIDT not… (laughing – it seems the interviewer thought Jackson meant Will SMITH) nah it’s Will Schmidt, he’s another good friend of ours.

Interviewer: You say it quick and people will be impressed!

Interviewer: (talks fast) WILL SCHMIDT…

Jackson: …. directed our music video. ‘We just wanna say thank you to Will… SCHMIDT.’ And, uh, thanks Will.

(laughing)

Jackson: No, but we uh, we got some good people around us. Its like, what we’ve always wanted to do with our careers, and um, our art.

Interviewer: Yeah.

(Talking over each other)

Interviewer: So it is music first or movies first? I you had to make the decision tomorrow?

Jackson: I’m gonna have my cake and I’m gonna eat it too, and I don’t even like cake!

Interviewer: That’s awesome!

Interviewer: Thanks for your time…

Jackson: Oh yeah, cheers… I’m probably gonna head inside but thank you once again.

When MTV News recently visited the London set of “Dread,” based on a short story by the twisted mind behind “Hellraiser” and “Candyman,” things weren’t looking good for the 23-year-old actor who shot to stardom last month portraying earnest vampire Jasper Hale. But, as Jackson was eager to tell us, life has never been better.

“This has been a fun movie to work on,” he smiled, pretending for a moment that he wasn’t soaked in Karo syrup. “It’s my first leading-man role. I was always a character actor when I was in theater as a kid, and I’ve done a lot of character roles in television shows and whatnot. But this is a character that has a lot of development, a lot of progression. … I like roles that I can sink my teeth into.”

Like so many of his “Twilight” friends, Rathbone can now satiate his hunger as only a young star coming off a hot Hollywood film can. But rather than cashing in with generic romantic comedies or action flicks, he has chosen to partake in Barker’s psychological thriller that tells the tale of Stephen (Rathbone), Quaid (Shaun Evans) and Cheryl (Hanne Steene), three college kids making a documentary about the origins of fear — until one decides that the only way to get to the truth is by extracting dread from those around him.

” ‘Dread’ is a Kinsey-esque study of fear,” the star explained of the plot, which is already being loosely compared to the “Saw” films’ exploration of the lengths people will go to for survival. “We’re setting up this fear study, and what we do is we interview people about their greatest fears and their dreads. The film starts out in this sweet college and then gets darker as people start having to live through their fears. A lot of times, it makes them stronger or it breaks them. That’s what this film is about: It’s about facing your fears and seeing what happens.”

And the bottom line, according to Rathbone, is that he had never read a script quite like it before.

“It’s not that typical romance, love-triangle thing — which is what I’d really like to stay away from,” Jackson laughed while discussing the decades-old story by Barker, as well as the film version being overseen by director Anthony DiBlasi. “I’ve always loved the horror genre. As a kid, I wasn’t allowed to really watch TV, let alone horror. I come from a fairly conservative background, and so I had to sneak away to watch movies like ‘The Terminator’ when I was 10 years old, and when I was about 13, 14, a good friend of mine gave me a George A. Romero box set with ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and ‘Day of the Dead.’ I loved those movies, but I had to hide them under my bed as a kid.

“If my parents saw them, they would have grounded me for months,” he remembered. “They didn’t want certain images ingrained in my mind.”

Now, Rathbone is hard at work bringing himself to death’s door and hoping a portion of his sizable fanbase will similarly risk getting grounded to see the film when it comes to theaters next year. “I really have to give all props to my fans, because they’ve really been so supportive of me,” he explained. ” ‘Twilight’ has given me, and a lot of the other actors on ‘Twilight,’ a much wider fanbase, and they’ve been so supportive of us, and that’s really what we need. As an actor, you need an audience to practice your craft. A painter can paint alone, a photographer can take pictures alone, a musician can play — but as an actor, you need someone to watch you, and we couldn’t have a better audience. … I’ve been able to do a lot more films because of them.”

But whereas “Twilight” famously took the fangs off vampires and portrayed the Cullens as vegetarians whose bloodlust could be held in check by the occasional woodland-creature buffet, “Dread” seeks no such horror suppression. “Several of us go through a lot of prosthetics in this film,” Rathbone explained. “It’s really good. I mean, it looks real, and it’s fairly horrific.

“And when you’re off camera, it’s fun to chase someone around covered in blood,” he joked. “That’s a lot of fun.”

But don’t think that all this blood and gore will make “Dread” a completely different film than “Twilight,” as Rathbone said both films share similarly shadowy undertones. “There’s something about playing darker, like a vampire, or somebody like Stephen who’s just kind of wrapped up in death,” he compared. “With Stephen, it’s the death of his brother, and he’s trying to get over that. With Jasper in ‘Twilight,’ it’s about controlling the urges to feed and trying to establish that humanity. I think that’s what I really love about playing a darker character, finding the humanity. Because we all have dark sides of ourselves, and if we let that control us, then we’re never gonna be happy. It’s about finding the balance.”

Based on Rathbone’s diverse marathon of filming a “Donnie Darko” sequel, “Dread” and “New Moon” back-to-back-to-back, as well as his continued participation in the band 100 Monkeys, finding a balance doesn’t seem to be a problem for this fast-rising star.

Source.