If there's anything we need right now, it's a bit of nostalgia. So the arrival this week of the entire Twilight film series on Netflix has us very, very excited. But watching them seems a little different in light of a 2018 interview concerning its casting. Mainly, Twilight author Stephanie Meyers' resistance to casting non-white actors.
Twilight, the first film, was released in 2008, making stars of Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart and taking an incredible $393.6 million at the box office. It was directed by Catherine Hardwicke, then best known for helming Sisterhood Of The Travelling Pants. She was keen to cast a diverse group of young actors to play the Cullen family of vampires, as well as Bella's friendship circle, but she claims that many of her ideas were vetoed by the writer.
Speaking to The Daily Beast in 2018, Catherine addressed the disputes and revealed her own plans. 'Stephanie had not really written it (the books) that way. So she probably just didn’t see the world that way. And I was like, 'oh my God, Alice, I wanted her to be Japanese!' I had all these ideas. And she just could not accept the Cullens to be more diverse, because she had really seen them in her mind, she knew who each character was representing in a way, a personal friend or a relative or something. She said, "I wrote that they had this pale glistening skin!"'
Allowances were, eventually, met. Laurent, one of the three villains of the first film, was played by Kenyan-born Edi Gathegi. 'The only reason that came through was he was described as having olive skin [in the book]', Catherine says. 'And I said, there are black olives out there! Then she was open to the students in [Bella’s] peer group being other ethnicities, so we got Christian Serratos and Justin Chon, so we were able to open it up a little bit.'
Other franchises have been more open to flexibility. While Hermione Granger was played by Emma Watson in the Harry Potter film franchise, for example, Noma Dumezweni was cast to play her in the stage play, The Cursed Child.
Hopefully, if Twilight ever gets the remake treatment, Stephanie could rethink her stance.
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