If you weren’t active on fan blogs in the early days of the Twilight movies being cast, you are 1) lucky and 2) don’t know what you missed! Diehard fans anxiously awaited casting decisions that were delivered via author Stephanie Meyer’s blog. This was the golden age of the internet: the author of the source text was fully involved and brought you along every step of the way. Now, casting choices can be a top-secret moment. But anyway.
In 2007, Meyer revealed that Robert Pattinson had gotten the role of the dreamy vampire Edward Cullen. Though she also shared who her first choice was: Henry Cavill.
“The most disappointing thing for me is losing my perfect Edward,” Meyer wrote on her blog at the time. “Henry Cavill is now twenty-four-years-old. Let us have a moment of quiet in which to mourn…” Pattinson was 21 at the time and had just appeared in the Harry Potter franchise, so that made him more suitable to play a 100-year-old high schooler, right?
Meyer added that maybe Cavill would be open to playing another charming vampire, Edward’s adoptive father Carlisle. “I’m not willing to relinquish Henry completely; since I hear that Charlie Hunnam refuses to consider scripts which include vampires, I propose that Henry play Carlisle!” That role eventually went to Peter Facinelli.
Cavill recently appeared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, when he was asked if he felt any type of resentment towards Pattinson for snagging the major role. He explained that he didn’t even know about the movie but it would have been ‘cool’ to be involved. “I didn’t know about [Twilight],” Cavill said. “I didn’t know about them wanting to cast me and the internet wasn’t quite the tool that it is now and so I only found out afterwards. I was like, ‘Oh okay, that would have been cool.’” The internet is definitely a casting tool these days!
Still, there is no bad blood between Cavill and Pattinson. That is…until they eventually have to one-up each other in the DC universe. That will be fun!