That's all Twilight was to Pattinson, at first: an American job. He was in Los Angeles, crashing on his agent's couch, looking for an American job. He'd followed up what was, back then, the biggest role of his career-in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, as Cedric Diggory, sort of the haughty blond Iceman to Harry's Maverick-by getting fired from a play in London, where he grew up. He was on the verge of quitting acting, he says. Okay-to be fair, that's not all he tells us. 'I took half a Valium and then went into this thing-and all this stuff happened.'

Here is what Pattinson says about getting the part of Edward the vampire in Twilight: Did we mention that he's had about nineteen cups of coffee He asks the waiter about the soup. Those frozen cheeseburgers, from the store. has a microwave, and that he's never had a microwave before, and that he spends a lot of time looking for new things you can microwave. He explains that the place he's staying at in L.A. Instead, Pattinson goes on, filling dead air. In a vampire movie, he'd have said this with a suggestive eyebrowwiggle, and then they'd cut to our pallid corpse tumbling out of a Dumpster.

'God, I don't remember the last time I ate,' Pattinson says. 'He wouldn't say anything,' Pattinson says, 'and he also wouldn't leave,' so Pattinson sat there and talked about himself for three hours and drank enough coffee to make a rhino's heart explode. Some guy offering him a part, maybe, in a movie so double top secret he couldn't tell Pattinson what it was about. He's just come from a bigtime meeting with a director and can't wait to tell us how weird it was. His clothes smell like he has recently purchased them off the back of someone less fortunate than he. He slides into his chair, dressed all in black, with a weeksold beard, hair crammed under a wool cap, looking like Justin Timberlake researching an offBroadway turn as Terry Malloy. Long enough for it to gross more than $150 million, long enough for the studio to pull the trigger on the first of three potential sequels by replacing director Catherine Hardwicke with one of the guys responsible for the American Pie franchise, not long enough for Pattinson to grasp what any of these developments mean for him, or the importance of dissembling in the presence of reporters.

It's December Twilight, in which Pattinson, 22, plays an adorably tortured permateenage vampire too principled to drink human blood, has been in theaters for about a month.

Robert pattinson in harry potter series