Here are some new pictures of Mackenzie Foy, who is going to be playing Edward and Bella’s daughter Renesmee in Breaking Dawn. The photos were taken by Dani Brubaker.
“For once, Kristen Stewart seemed at ease.
The 20-year-old “Twilight” star was enjoying a rare moment of anonymity at one of her favorite restaurants, a rustic hideaway shrouded by a canopy of ferns, perched alongside a twisty road in Topanga Canyon. Notices for a local farmers market, a childbirth preparation class and a 70th birthday celebration for John Lennon decorated the haunt’s bulletin board.
A few honeybees circled the veggie burger on her plate as she chatted about playing a teenage runaway-turned-stripper in her latest film, “Welcome to the Rileys,” a drama coming to theaters Friday. She wasn’t running her hands through her hair, or incessantly shaking her leg, or stuttering as she tried to express herself — all of the characteristic nervous tics she’s often displayed in public since the first “Twilight” film rocketed her into a frightening orbit of celebrity two years ago.
Then, suddenly, her face fell. A stranger was timidly inching over to her table.
“Could I take a picture for my girlfriend in Thailand?” the man, who appeared to be in his 30s, asked. “She’s a great-looking girl. I just recently got into your movies with her. Is that cool?”
Stewart paused, her left leg slowly beginning to bounce. “Yeah,” she sighed. “Yeah, sure.” She posed for a photo with the interloper.
Oblivious to her agitation, he lingered. “What’s your name again? Kristen, right? Want me to show you my girl?” he asked, beginning to flip through images on his digital camera. “Just for her to know that I picked up breakfast at your restaurant. You know, we’re the type of people that don’t get out much.”
Finally, he retreated. Stewart pulled the hood of her black sweatshirt over her head.
“It’s strange when you become a novelty,” she said, slouching down into her seat. “It’s sort of like, ‘Yeah, sure. Go put this on your Facebook so your friends can laugh at it.’ Because that’s what they will do. And I usually say no to people like that, when they’re like, ‘Yo, yo, can I get a picture of you?’ And it’s like, ‘No, … you,’ ” she said, interjecting an obscenity. “That’s what I’m thinking.”
Stewart, it’s clear, is still grappling with fame, which came at her hard and fast when at age 17 she took on the role of Bella Swan in the “Twilight” vampire franchise, whose fourth installment begins production next month. She’s always trailed by paparazzi. A frenzy breaks out whenever she’s spotted off-set with “Twilight” co-star Robert Pattinson; tabloids speculate breathlessly about their personal lives.
(One celebrity website, for example, recently gushed about its “exclusive new details” on the pair’s visit to a Play N Trade video game store in Prairieville, La., where they are preparing to film the first part of “Breaking Dawn.” If you must know, they reportedly bought the game “Fallout: New Vegas.”)
Unlike other young stars like Justin Bieber or Lindsay Lohan, who seem to relish sharing tidbits about their lives with fans on social networking sites like Twitter, Stewart has strenuously resisted constant demands to divulge more of herself to the public.
In past interviews, she’s displayed a penchant for stuttering and eye rolling, consequently developing a reputation for being sullen, or awkward. During a 2008 interview with David Letterman, she self-consciously referred to herself as “actually really boring.”
“I don’t have a personality fit for television. I just don’t,” she admitted, sounding genuinely friendly. “Even when I really feel like I’ve had fun with something and been totally fine and we talked about stuff that I thought was interesting — even then. I don’t know. It’s getting easier. It used to be a lot worse. And it’s totally my fault, too. I guess I just put too much pressure on myself before, and it showed.”
Though she started acting half a lifetime ago — garnering early acclaim from the likes of Jodie Foster, who co-starred with her in 2002′s “Panic Room,” and Sean Penn, who directed her in 2007′s “Into the Wild” — Stewart says she’s been unable to nail a performance as a carefree, charming or cute interview subject, because that’s simply not who she is.
Sixteen-year-old Dakota Fanning, who costarred with Stewart in “The Runaways” this year, picked up on her uneasiness during the film’s media tour.
“I think that her being uncomfortable doing interviews — Kristen is exactly who she is. It’s something that I admire her for,” Fanning said. “When she’s doing an interview, she really thinks about what she’s saying. She’s a truthful, honest person, and wants that to come across so badly.”
Things got so bad, her team sent her to media training.
“Basically, they told me that I should be ready for any question that’s thrown at me, and I should have a stock answer, because then it won’t confuse things and you’ll never be caught off guard,” she recalled. “And there’s no way to do that. There’s no way to be prepared for a conversation with someone you don’t know about something that means the world to you.”
What seems to worry Stewart most about all the scrutiny, though, is that it could take away from her reputation as an actress with actual talent. It was her performance in “Into the Wild,” before “Twilight” even came out, that convinced director Jake Scott that she was right for the lead in “Welcome to the Rileys.”
“What I got from her in that movie was this vulpine, wily, kind of fox-like quality,” he said. “She’s got a way of looking at people that I found really compelling.”
In Scott’s film, Stewart plays Mallory, a foul-mouthed teen living on her own in New Orleans, working at a strip club. When she crosses paths with married couple Doug and Lois Riley ( James Gandolfini and Melissa Leo), they take her under their wing and help her begin to turn her life around.
To prepare, Stewart took pole dancing lessons, visited strip clubs and didn’t wash her hair for five weeks. Her appearance was so convincingly trashy, she said, that when she walked into a club off Sunset Boulevard, the owner offered her a job. The actress persuaded him to let her talk to the dancers to get insight about their lives.
“The only thing that I can figure out is that something most of the time was taken from them,” she said. “Like, you can’t hurt me more than I’ve already been hurt. And you can’t abuse me more than I abuse myself every day, so I’m gonna take from you. I’m gonna take your money.”
Her interest in bringing authenticity to the film energized Leo.
“There’s a lot of young folks who want to be actors, but when they really have something going on, it makes me excited,” said the Oscar-nominated actress. “She was 18 when we shot the movie — almost too young to know all the stuff she does, to get inside something like that. She had the willingness to literally be exposed in the way she was.”
Scott says Stewart has become more confident in the two years he’s known her and hasn’t let celebrity warp her identity. “She’s still Kristen to me — this kid from the Valley who’s into Van Morrison and watching movies and hanging out,” he says.
Fanning, though, says it might behoove Stewart to recalibrate her attitude about fame.
“Situations have happened to me when I was a cheerleader at school and paparazzi would sneak onto the field. It’s something that comes along with what I’ve chosen to do with my life,” said Fanning, who wasn’t even 10 when her star took off after 2001′s “I Am Sam.” “Sometimes you have to accept it, even if you don’t think it’s fair or right.”
Stewart fears that adopting that attitude might destroy her.
“I love my job,” she said. “And because of that, I need to protect it.”
Here is a sneak peek video from TROIX Magazine of Christian Serratos and Jeremy Sumpter (Friday Night Lights) of their romantic photo shoot for the upcoming November issue of the magazine.
The “FAME: Taylor Lautner” comic book will be in stores this Wednesday, October 27th.
Lautner was a relatively unknown actor until he made his debut in the popular vampire-romance movies. Those days are over. Today, Lautner is as much a household name as are Stewart and Pattinson.
Kimberly Sherman, who’s penned the biography comics of both Pattinson and Stewart, also wrote the new Lautner comic. Warren Martineck, an artist for DC Comics’ WildStorm studio, provided the interior art.
Both Fame titles are 32-page issues and brings to life in graphic form the stories of the worlds biggest celebrities.
“We’ve found a niche with our bio comics,” said Davis. “Our success with this comic shows that there is a much wider audience for sequential storytelling than many thought. These readers are simply looking for something other than superheroes or horror. With our bio comics, we strive to bring these new readers evenhanded, well-researched looks at some of their favorite celebrities.”
Source
BoxOfficeMojo.com has the final figures for Eclipse movie. The total was $690,131,507 worldwide, Australia contributed $28,566,737 to that total. New Moon grossed $709,827,462 worldwide with Australia adding $35,164,930. Twilight came in at $392,616,625 worldwide, $15,484,821 came from Australia.
New Moon was the Favorite fo the saga so far going by the numbers. Wonder what numbers breaking Dawn will bring in
A new trailer for Kellan’s upcoming movie Meskada has been released:
The West Australian has posted an article about Xavier Samuel:
Thank your lucky stars that kidnapping, DIY lobotomies and gruesome mutilation aren’t a run-of-the-mill experience at most teenagers’ high school proms.
But that’s exactly what Xavier Samuel “endured” as the lead character in the decidedly quirky new Australian pop-horror film The Loved Ones.
It’s not every day that household drills and humble kitchen kettles are put to such creative macabre use, so when Samuel first read the script for The Loved Ones, his immediate reaction was, “Who’s the demented mind that came up with this stuff?”
Speaking on the phone from Sydney where he is back home for a break, the 26-year-old actor says he was drawn to the complexity of the script, even though the large extent of his role in the film consists of writhing and shrieking in agony while his character is nailed to the floor in a house of horrors.
This is because (as if high school balls aren’t excruciating enough already) Samuel’s character Brent is kidnapped on the night of his school ball after he knocks back an invitation from the quietest girl in his school, whose father is the resident town weirdo-come-psychotic murderer.
Perhaps it’s the inherent “Australianness” of the film, but while it might seem an odd combination, the film successfully forces the mundane and the extreme to converge, and juxtaposes moments of genuine recoil with laugh-out-loud moments of hilarity. After wrapping up the film in 2008 and traversing the festival circuit in 2009, Samuel is excited to see how the film will be received by Australian audiences when released in cinemas next month. “When I read the script I thought, ‘Wow this is really rare.’ Especially with horror films, sincerity tends to be a bit of a pitfall – you watch the film and end up laughing for all the wrong reasons when it’s not necessarily intended to be funny,” he says. “But The Loved Ones has its tongue firmly in its cheek and has a sense of humour about it.
“That’s why it appeals to a wider audience, not just the horror fan base. Because of the school-dance thing, which is an experience everyone can identify with, and because the film has a sense of humour, it sort of transcends the genre in a way.”
Born in country Victoria, raised in Adelaide, now based in Sydney, Samuel has had a busy few years since his graduation from Adelaide’s Flinders University Drama Centre, which has seen him leapfrog from low-scale Australian productions to big-budget blockbusters. His first foray into the US film industry was a role as newborn vampire Riley in the third instalment of the Twilight franchise, Eclipse.
“I was in Sydney doing American auditions for a while, just sending these DVDs off, not knowing whose desk they landed on, or if anyone even watched the audition, just sending them off into oblivion,” Samuel says.
“Twilight was just another audition that came along, so I did it as best I could and sent it off and forgot about it. A month or two went by and then I heard it was down to me and four or five other guys, so I got myself on a plane to Vancouver, met the director and it all happened fairly quickly after that.
“It was incredible to be involved in a story of that magnitude that reaches that far and wide, and has a really passionate following.”
As for the fans, Samuel embraces the self-proclaimed Twihard fan base as a phenomenon in itself.
“Often people palm it off as craziness but it’s really a kind of cool thing when people are able to express their enthusiasm in that way.”
For a young actor breaking into the US market, being involved in a film with such a widespread release and enormous publicity as Twilight was a dream gig for Samuel, and he’s appreciative of the opportunities which have presented themselves as a result.
“I was lucky enough to go over to Berlin to shoot a film with Roland Emmerich called Anonymous, which is completely different to the tortured, comic world of The Loved Ones, and the vampiric, dangerous love triangle that is Twilight. This film is a political conspiracy thriller about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.”
And from the sounds of it, work opportunities aren’t the only perks Samuel has been enjoying since his role in Twilight – his paparazzi-credibility rating isn’t doing too badly either – snaps of Samuel are booming business, especially now he’s dating Iranian-born former Miss Europe Shermine Shahrivar (condolences to all interested Twihards).
But Samuel shrugs off the idea of being paparazzi fodder.
“It’s a weird thing to be judged on how tight your pants are, not how good an actor you are.”
As for the future, while the lustre of Hollywood beckons, Samuel says he isn’t ready to turn his back on the Australian film industry just yet, and is in negotiations to be involved in another local production.
“I think it’s always important to remain a part of the industry that has supported me in the first place,” he says.
“I guess I’ve been very fortunate in a way, the talent pool in Australia is so deep, and a lot of my actor friends aren’t working, so I have been very lucky that I have had these opportunities come my way.
“I don’t really have any prerequisites or any grand plan – I’d be happy doing shop-front theatre in Melbourne, it doesn’t really bother me as long as I get the opportunity to do what I love and sustain myself, it’s just gravy.”
While it’s unlikely we’ll see him Twilighting again (it’s somewhat difficult to resurrect vampires who have met their untimely death by decapitation), it’s safe to say we will be seeing a lot more of Xavier Samuel on the big screen.
‘It was incredible to be involved in a story of that magnitude that reaches that far and wide, and has a really passionate following.’
The Loved Ones opens on November 4.
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