Jennifer Lawrence auditioned to be in the Twilight franchise but admits she was rejected “immediately” for the star-making role.
Love it or hate it, the Twilight saga was a phenomenon like few others in cinema history, creating a fandom as passionate as those associated with such titans as Harry Potter and Star Wars. Based on the best-selling Stephenie Meyer novels, the five-movie series began with Twilight in 2008 and announced Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart as huge stars thanks to lead roles as Edward Cullen and Bella Swan, respectively. Lots of hopeful actresses tried out for the sought-after Bella role, and it turns out the one and only Jennifer Lawrence was among the auditionees…
The 33-year-old American actress would be established as a franchise star four years after the release of Twilight thanks to her leading role in The Hunger Games, reprising the role of Katniss Everdeen in three sequels.
During an episode of the movie podcast The Rewatchables, Jennifer was invited as a guest to discuss a favorite film of hers, the 1994 comedy classic Dumb And Dumber. Taking a detour in the conversation, she admitted to the host that she tried out for the vampire romance blockbuster.
“I auditioned for Twilight,” she started. “They turned me down immediately. I didn’t even get a callback. But my life would’ve been totally different. I got Hunger Games I think, like, a year later. It was probably after Winter’s Bone,” an acclaimed 2010 thriller.
“I was still in a franchise, so I was still trying to counteract the franchise-ness,” she remarked on her Hunger Games years, remembering that she would do other films in between installments so she wouldn’t be pigeonholed.
“I’d still be doing that if I was in Twilight. But I almost didn’t do Hunger Games because ‘Twilight’ had come out and that fandom had happened.”
JLaw on why she didn’t get the Twilight role
As you know, the Bella role was given to Kristen and the rest is history. You may be thinking that the part would have been well suited to JLaw, and you wouldn’t be the only person to think so.
When previously interviewed on The Howard Stern Show, the titular host asked: “Why didn’t you get that? I would think you would be good for that.”
It’s a fair question, but the No Hard Feelings actress admits that there was a major gap in her knowledge when it came to the source material and the nature of the project.
“I didn’t really know what it was,” she revealed. “When you audition when you’re like, you know, like a run of the mill actor, you know we’re all auditioning for all sorts of things, you just get like five pages, and then they’re like ‘Act, monkey’. When it came out I was like ‘Hot damn, whoa, yeah’,” realizing just how much of a big deal it was.
When asked if she was jealous she wasn’t in the movie, she replied that she wasn’t and recalled having that same conversation with the now two-time Oscar-winner Emma Stone.
However, she did admit she was envious when she didn’t get the lead role in Tim Burton’s reimagining of Alice In Wonderland starring Mia Wasikowska. “That one devastated me,” she revealed.
Twilight may have been quite different with somebody else in the role, but the KStew stans wouldn’t hear of it.
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