Robert Pattinson

Shrieking, ululating, OMG-ing teen girls aren't usually the best arbiters of men's style. (See: Cassidy, David; Mark, Marky; Boys, Backstreet.) So give the nearest tween a high five for freaking out over Robert Pattinson, the British sensation who stars in gossip columns, gossip sites, and oh yeah, a little billiondollar franchise called Twilight. Young Rob's probably got the best head of hair since James Dean, and he lets it do the talking. He also lets it fly: no pompadour, no side part…As far as we can tell, he just runs his hands through it every five minutes. And the clothes? What clothes? A pair of jeans, a T-shirt, an unbuttoned and untucked plaid shirt…That's it. He dresses his age (23); he dresses to his strengths; he dresses so you don't give a damn about how he's dressed.—WILL WELCH

QF: What was it like working with Rob? Did you feel starstruck?
Peyton: I really didn't, but one girl was shaking and crying!

QF: What was the most challenging scene to shoot?
Peyton: The most challenging scene to shoot was probably the one where Caroline comes into school, and I start picking on her. Rob had to throw a fire extinguisher out the window, so it was kind of crazy.

QF: Were there any bloopers or embarrassing moments while filming?
Peyton: Rob grabbed the fire extinguisher and couldn’t lift it. It was too heavy and he fell to the ground! He wasn't hurt or anything, but he was laughing. They had to empty it and make it lighter.

NEW YORK — There are stars, there are idols, and there are the squeal-worthy — the guys you merely have to mention for girls to explode with ecstasy, glee and a certain amount of misery.

Such is Robert Pattinson, the 23-year-old English actor who plays vampire Edward Cullen in the "Twilight" series, and who turns out to be a very gentle and seemingly normal guy. His between-ghoul gig, alas, is playing the conflicted Tyler Roth in the Allen Coulter-directed drama "Remember Me," which opened March 12.

He recently took some time out from his busy schedule to answer a few questions about his latest film and his blood-sucking alter ego:

Q. Did you pick this project just to counter your Edward Cullen image?
A. That was one of the reasons. But there was also something different about the script that stayed with me. It was odd — you wonder why it was written, what happened to the writer, what elements are true. And it seemed like I could spend the summer in New York and it would be really nice after all the pandemonium.

Q. Pierce Brosnan, who plays your father, was James Bond for four films; you've got a four-film franchise. You ever talk about that?
A. Not really, but he was great, zero pretense, completely comfortable in his own skin. The first time we went out to dinner, there were people at another table looking at him, so he went over and introduced himself and suddenly everyone was much more comfortable.

Q. They were looking at him and not you?
A. They had no idea who I was. It was an old French restaurant on the Upper West Side. Someone said, "Is this your son?" And Pierce said, "Yes! This is my son. ..." He was really fun to work with.

Q. There are only four "Twilight" novels; the third film comes out in June. It seems like you're in the homestretch.
A. That's why I was never particularly worried. They'll do the last one at the end of the year, and that's it. Done. And because I didn't start when I was really a kid, I don't feel like I'm losing anything or selling my childhood. It's such a funny thing to have gone through. It's such a supernova. It exploded so quickly, and then it's finished.

Q. How do you refashion yourself after that?
A. I'm making "Bel Ami," which is based on a Guy de Maupassant novel. I play a con man who seduces his way up the social ladder, betrays everybody. Anybody who does him a favor, he stabs in the back, and then he gets rewarded for it in the end. He's a real menace to society. It's a completely different experience from what I've done before.

Girls strip off for him, fans mob his set, but the sweet little star of Twilight, and the world's most wanted man, still struggles with his sex scenes

Would I like to interview Robert Pattinson, the world’s hottest young actor? Yes, obviously — although getting close to the boy who plays the “devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful” vampire Edward Cullen in Twilight at first seems virtually impossible. Penned away in the Dorchester, like a rare Siberian tiger cub — he can’t stay at home in Barnes when he comes back from LA because the fans know where he lives — he is being firmly guarded by a brace of film execs when I arrive for the interview.

A spiky PR woman for his new film, Remember Me — a romantic drama memorable mainly for the fact that it has Pattinson in it and is not a Twilight film — loudly repeats instructions that there are to be “no personal questions”. A Spanish reporter returns from the interview room claiming that when she asked him if he liked cooking, she nearly got thrown out. Another, a Brazilian, reveals that, in fact, he did get thrown out of an interview with Pattinson’s Twilight co-star and rumoured girlfriend, Kristen Stewart, back in Sao Paulo, for asking about boyfriends. “Her bodyguard asked me to leave,” he shrieks. “I said nao! And then he tosched me on the shoulder, and I said, ‘Okay, I go.’”

“Like, who the ferque is this diva?” says someone else, and by the time I am ushered next door to meet him, I’m thinking the same. But as soon as I clap eyes on him, and take in that kittenish smile, the tousled, leonine eyebrows and — of course — the lush whip of unwashed hair, all that instantly vanishes. Pattinson is calm, polite and pleasant: heaven on a stick.

Swigging nonchalantly from a large bottle of Hildon like Stoli at a Facebook house party, he is also utterly oblivious to the commotion outside. And as for being a diva, well, let’s just say his agent, a jaded LA type who sits in the room with him, is far from impressed with his attempts so far, rolling his eyes when Pattinson asks: “Nick, am I a diva?” The actor furrows his brow. “I mean, I had a very diva-ish conversation with some people about some stuff in this film about a day ago...” Nick sighs and drawls: “He just said what he thought in a script meeting. Please don’t use that as an example.”

“But I was very... bold,” protests Pattinson. Of course, that is exactly what he isn’t, because ever since his first knicker-melting appearance in Twilight, Pattinson, 23, has become a byword for shy hotness. Formerly a public-school hoodie from southwest London with a bit part in Harry Potter, he now commands £8m a movie and is such a huge lust object that he is unable to go anywhere unattended. During the filming of Remember Me, “3,500 people turned up and went completely mental”, he says. He is constantly asked for kisses and autographs, and recently, when he joked that the best way to get his attention was to take your clothes off, to his horror one girl in the audience promptly did so. Does he find the attention irritating? He shrugs. “I guess it’s part of your reality,” he says, before admitting he’s a “little bit harder to deal with” now. “I get stressed out much quicker.”

Then again, being beautiful “is quite hard”, even though he insists that 50% of people don’t get his appeal: “They’re like, what’s that all about?” Certainly, today, he is trying his best not to be beautiful, in a greasy cap and sweats. Only his eyebrows seem manicured, although he insists they aren’t. He had them plucked on the first Twilight film, but “you get to the point where you think, ‘Okay, I look like a transvestite now’”. Not that the girls — Twilight’s obsessed fans are called Twi­harders, and a documentary, Robsessed, has been made about them — were put off.

Over the past 18 months, the actor has been linked to countless models and actresses, and recently appeared to confirm the rumours that he was dating Stewart, but then mysteriously claimed that he was “allergic to vagina”. Er, what was that about? Is he dating Stewart then? Or is he, in fact, gay? I heard his two older sisters used to dress him up and call him Claudia when he was a boy.

Actually, he’s “straight”, he says. He found the male-on-male sex scenes he had to perform in a film, Little Ashes, last year “strange. I played Salvador Dali. We were both straight, but he was Spanish, so much more confident about being naked and stuff, although when it comes down to it, it’s just as awkward with a girl, especially if you are straight and with a girl you don’t like... Anyway, Javier was really cool. After we had been pretending to have sex on this balcony in Barcelona, he was like, ‘We have such a strange job...’”

Poor Pattinson! Eyeing the bed in his suite, I dare a question about those sex scenes with girls. He famously had to pop a Valium to get through the audition for Twilight, in which he needed to make out on a bed with Stewart. For the love scenes in Remember Me, his co-star Emilie de Ravin “was very, very, very comfortable”, he sighs. “I’m always the one who’s the most uncomfortable. So we came into the room, and they said ‘It’s a closed set,’ blah, blah, and we got on to the bed and the director was like, ‘I got you these things, if just maybe you wanted to use them. You don’t have to use them, maybe it will make you more comfortable.’ They were these bondage things: lube and handcuffs and porn videos. It was so funny!

"And when you end up doing it, you have this little patch on your privates. I didn’t really tape it up properly, so I’d spent so long taping it round myself and then literally it falls off within one second and it’s taped to the sheet. And you realise the whole crew are looking directly at your butt crack.” He blanches. “I can’t think of anything exciting for them about this. It gives you a lot of respect for porn stars.”

I decide to dive in and ask him about Stewart. Does he believe in love at first sight? “Yes,” he says. Has he... ever been in love? “Ah, yes, I think so.” “What’s...” Nick looks up from his BlackBerry. “Let’s keep to the film,” he snaps. Pattinson looks embarrassed, but the moment has passed, and I am to leave. He gets up and gives me a kiss on the cheek: light and soft and not at all unfresh. I read somewhere one girl’s parents paid £20,000 in a charity auction for one of those.

Remember Me is released on April 2

Remember Me's box office receipts jumped 10.3% on Tuesday. Grossing $735,630, the jump was the largest daily % of the top films. The average change for the top 7 grossing films, day over day, was +1.5%. (Remember Me grossed #5).

Monday's day over day sales was much the same. While the average of the top 7 grossing films dropped -65.9% vs Sunday sales on Monday, Remember Me dropped a smaller 59.7%. Remember Me grossed $664,516 on Monday.

Is this word of mouth at work? Are people who had not heard about Remember Me or people who we have been telling to see this wonderful movie going to see it? Is it a trend? Maybe. Two days does not a trend make, but it is a start.

So keep telling people about Remember Me. Suggest that they see the film for themselves and make sure you see it again yourself. And for those of you who live where it will be released this weekend, make sure you see it.

Total Box Office to Date:
Domestic - $9,489,295
International - $1,770,000
Total - $11,259,295

Source: Remember Me Film.Com