Hot Actor: Q&A With "Twilight" Star Robert Pattinson

• Hot Actor: Robert Pattinson
• Review: Twilight
• Robert Pattinson Vs. the Jonas Brothers: Who Has the Crazier Fans?

How is the Twilight fandom is different from the Harry Potter movies? I think you've mentioned that the sound of the screams is even different.
It's different because I think it's almost solely females of a certain age group, and they have a very specific tone. It's much more to do with the sort of sexuality aspect of it. So many girls made this guy [their ideal], so when they see you it's like all of their energy is projected onto you. It's a really strange experience. I've never been in an experience where people just want to touch you — it's like being in a boy band.

Is it weird to have girls that are so young have this incredibly sexualized thing around you?
It's weird that you get 8-year-old girls coming up to you saying, "Can you just bite me? I want you to bite me." It is really strange how young the girls are, considering the book is based on the virtues of chastity, but I think it has the opposite effect on its readers though. [Laughs]

Do you think that's part of it, though? One of the things that seems to make Edward so attractive to younger girls is that you can have it both ways. He's the ultimate bad boy, and someone that you shouldn't want, who would never harm you.
That's exactly what it is. It's a certain type of girl. I don't know what it is — when you look at fan sites [you can tell] — but there's definitely a very large fleet of people, it's actually Americans, that want those type of guys. In the book she knows the whole time [he's not going to hurt her], but Kristen [Stewart] and I tried to make it more not caring, more unpredictable. It's what I liked about the story — he's literally holding himself back every single turn, never lets up.

He's such a sort of gentlemanly character, and Kristen and I really, really emphasized that — especially when there are intimate scenes. When we did the blocking for the kissing scenes, we would be going way further than [director] Catherine [Hardwicke] thought.

And why did you want to push it in that direction?
I guess to sort of scare little girls and stuff. [Laughs] I mean, people who read the books won't be expecting it, and, for a younger person's film, it's also quite shocking. When I read that scene in the book I thought it was kind of sexy, and then when you translate it onto film, the kissing is a little like a thing out of a TV series. So I thought, "How can we make this thing a little bit on the verge of wrong?"

I think a lot of people have already judged the film before they even started shooting us, and I didn't want to be part of a film that was just a cash-in thing. So we tried to take as many risks as we could, and tried to make it a little bit more serious than people expect. It's quite difficult to take too many risks.