Posted by Adam

Thursday July 16, 2009

Taylor Lautner admits he’s a little surprised by the global success of Twilight.

“It’s the weirdest thing,” the actor, 17, tells Interview magazine. “Nobody really saw it coming. I mean, we knew we were making a movie of a very popular book, but we didn’t know how well it was going to do. When it opened, it exploded, and that was not something any of us saw coming. Filming New Moon is a lot different than the first one because this time we know what we are getting into.”

“It puts a little more pressure on us than it did before,” he adds. “But for the most part, it’s been a blast.”

So what’s in store for his character, Jacob? “He’s a lot different than he was before,” Lautner explains. “He transforms mid-story—in the first half, he’s Twilight Jacob. I’m wearing a wig. My character’s very clumsy, outgoing, and friendly. When he transforms into a werewolf, he becomes something very different. It’s like I’m playing a split personality. Which is tricky, because sometimes I’ve had to play pre- and post-transformation Jacob on the same day of filming.”

On bulking up for the role, Taylor reveals, “As soon as I finished filming Twilight, I knew I had to get to work right away; there could be no waiting involved. The day I finished Twilight, I came home and started bulking up. For New Moon, I’m 30 pounds heavier than I was in Twilight.

“I was in the gym five days a week, two hours a day. At one point, I was going seven days straight. I had put on a lot of weight, and then I started losing it drastically, so I was worried. It turned out I was overworking myself. My trainer told me that I couldn’t break a sweat, because I was burning more calories than I was putting on.

“The hardest thing for me was the eating. At one point I had to shove as much food in my body as possible to pack on calories. My trainer wanted me to do six meals a day and not go two hours without eating. If I would cheat on eating one day, I could tell—I’d drop a few pounds.”

Tags: taylor lautner