Across the five Twilight movies, the baseball scene from the original installment still remains one of the most beloved and most referenced moments in the franchise. (So much so, it was recently recreated for a viral music video). And as Rosalie Cullen herself, Nikki Reed, previously revealed, the Twilight cast actually went to “cat” school to get into character for scenes such as the “Supermassive Black Hole” needle drop. Now, more of her co-stars are reflecting on the unique experience during rehearsals.
Ashley Greene and Kellan Lutz, who played Alice and Emmett Cullen in the Twilight movies, got to laughing as they reminisced about the cat movement class filmmaker Catherine Hardwicke had them go to to prepare to play vampires. Greene shared her thoughts on the experience with these words:
This is one of my least favorite experiences. I think it bonded us a little bit because we all felt like idiots. Maybe some people didn’t, I don’t know but I did. It was a rehearsal and [the instructor] was like, ‘I need you to all move like cats and meow and hiss’ and I was like, ‘Is she serious? Is she joking?’ Come to find out, a lot of people do reference animals for some of their characters in movements and it works very well. For me, it was a wildly uncomfortable situation.
The actress reunited with her Twilight brother on her podcast The Twilight Effect, where she’s going through the young adult movies with her good friend and Twihard, Melanie Howe. On a recent episode, they brought Kellan Lutz on for a lengthy conversation, during which the actor spoke bluntly about his experience on the franchise and his palpable chemistry with his Rosalie, Nikki Reed. Here’s Lutz’s own thoughts on the “cat” training the stars underwent:
[To Ashley Greene] You probably looked the best doing it, but it was really funny. But, it definitely helps with movement if you’re able to present yourself with those characteristics. How would your battle stance be? We all do it in football and sports and in the army. What would your formation be?
Though as the star admitted, he kind of stayed away from the cat training because the Twilight author compared Emmett Cullen to a bear in one excerpt. He used that detail to imagine his character as another animal. From the outside looking in, it’s pretty funny to think that the cast learned how to behave like cats in order to behave like vampires. But as Ashley Greene realized later in her career, a ton of actors do it to get into character.
For example, her former co-star, Robert Pattinson, just played The Batman and hilariously shared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that he looked up bat fights when preparing to play the superhero. His Catwoman, Zoë Kravitz also shared that she “hung out with cats a lot” ahead of playing the role in order to really embody her character. And of course, many of us remember the 2019 movie Cats, in which actors such as Taylor Swift, Rebel Wilson, James Corden and Idris Elba went to cat school as well to embody to play the cat-human hybrids in the musical many found to be “nightmare fuel” unfortunately due to the CGI design.
Cat classes aside, it’s great to see some of the Twilight cast back together nearly a decade after the last movie premiered. You can rewatch the vampire franchise now with a Hulu subscription.