Robert Pattinson was nearly fired from Twilight for not smiling enough

Robert Pattinson has revealed that he was nearly dropped from his career-making role as Edward Cullen in the Twilight franchise, as his insistence on playing him as slightly miserable began to concern the film’s producers.

Speaking to Howard Stern while promoting his latest film, Good Time, Pattinson recalled that he had a very specific interpretation of Edward when he began preparing for the role, but that it clashed with the giddier version of the character the producers were hoping for.”If you’re going into a relationship with someone, the way to make it really intense is if you can barely talk to each other, you can barely touch each other, it’s incredibly serious all the time,” he told Stern. “That’s what teenage relationships are. But everyone kind of wanted it to be, like, ‘No, they should just be, like, happy and having fun. That’s what people want.'”

“I remember the producers giving me a copy of the book with every single instance where my character smiled highlighted… But then I got the same book and a different colour highlighter and highlighted all the times where he frowns and everything,” Pattinson joked.

But when producers threatened to fire him from the film, he decided to compromise over his perpetual brooding.Pattinson also used the interview to reveal that he almost went down a very different career path — as a purveyor of pornographic magazines. Talking about his adolescent life pre-Twilight, Pattinson said that he was expelled from school after stealing adult magazines and selling them to his classmates at an inflated price.

“[I] used to go in and take, like, one or two, and then put them in my bag,” he said. “I was in my school uniform when I was doing it, and it was kind of risky. At the end, I got so cocky that I would take the entire rack.”I remember the guy who worked in the store shouting, like, ‘Hey!’ and then my two friends ran off, and I turned around, like, ‘What?’ I walked back up to him. I hadn’t zipped up my bag. This guy is pulling out all these porno magazines and it was when porn used to have, like, VHS tapes in the plastic sheet with it and he’s pulling all these things out, and I was sitting there humiliated with all the old people looking at me disgusted.

“Basically, a couple of days later, everything fell down,” he recalled. “Basically every single one of my friends snitched on me literally across the board.”