Robert Pattinson Was Almost Fired From Twilight

It's hard to imagine Twilight without all the brooding, but the lack of smiling nearly cost Robert Pattinson his job.

The actor who became a star thanks to his performance as the moody vampire Edward Cullen recently told Howard Stern (via Variety) that franchise producers thought he was playing it too serious. However, Pattinson said he was basing his performance on the depiction of Edward in the books, in which he has an exceptionally dark disposition and thinks of himself as a monster.

"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 said. "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.'"

Pattinson said his agents told him the news. "They flew up and were like, 'You have to do the opposite of what you're doing now or you're going to get fired today.'"

Producers gave him a copy of the book that highlighted each time his character smiled, and then a different color for every time he frowned. "I was probably going a little too miserable," he said. "So there was some kind of compromise made."

Of course, there is at least one really serious thing connected to Twilight. Somebody died watching 2010's Twilight Saga: Eclipse.