A role she can sink her teeth into

Stewart shows maturity as heroine in 'Twilight'

"Regardless of the size of a role, I can only work if I feel I have to. It's an indefinable thing. It's sort of feeling that if you don't do the character, she will die. I feel confused and out of place on a movie if I don't feel I am totally responsible for the character."

Stewart almost sloughed off Twilight. When the script was making the rounds, she was in the last two weeks of shooting for another picture (Adventureland), in Pittsburgh, and didn't want to shake her concentration. She says she read a synopsis that made it sound "shallow and vain - this story does not sum up well. But then I read the screenplay and subsequently begged for it. Catherine came to Pittsburgh, and at the end of a four-hour audition it was clear this was going to be my next project."

Director Hardwicke treated Stewart's casting as the key to the project: The prospective Edwards had to test with her. Edward Cullen is part of a clan of righteous vampires who've learned to control their thirst for human blood by slaking it with wild-animal blood. They nurture their dormant human instincts and pleasures and play down their vampirism. If they feel racial guilt over vampire slaughter, they work it off by serving and protecting humans. Their heightened physical and mental powers help them do just that. Edward possesses super-strength and super-speed and the ability to read minds; he doesn't know his own erotic power until Bella, a knockout who doesn't see her own beauty, starts swooning to his touch.

It was crucial that Bella and Edward have chemistry, but Stewart says that wasn't what won Pattinson the role. "The truth is, you can make chemistry with most actors - you can forge that. Of course, you can find people it's impossible with, and we did run across some of those. But what got Rob the part was his understanding of the character. He came in with a very apparent sense of fear and pain. [Nearly] everybody else came in thinking, 'Do I look good? Am I posing in the right statuesque way?' Rob was clearly thinking about more than that. And he was responsive. As most good actors should do, he wanted to see something before he responded. He watched and listened and observed."

Reed interjects, "That's rare in our generation," and Stewart says, earnestly, "That's very true, a lot of actors our age don't do that."

Then again, Stewart is ahead of her generational curve when it comes to artistic maturity. Stewart was a natural. She was 9 years old when she started to think, "I can do it."