Interview: Taylor Lautner, Twilight actor

YOU MIGHT recognise the teeth, the face and the muscle walls already because Taylor Lautner is best known as Jacob, the frequently shirtless werewolf from the hugely successful moody teen monster saga, Twilight.

Three years ago that movie propelled him and co-stars Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson into a pop culture mêlée and turned Lautner into a staple of teenage girls’ bedroom walls. However, his days as the werewolf take a silver bullet after the saga’s two-part finale, Breaking Dawn, with Part 1 due in November and the second instalment opening next year. So this week Lautner attempts to mark out his own territory for the first time with Abduction, where he plays a teenager who discovers that the parents who raised him are in fact secret agents, his life is a lie, and that no-one seems keen to tell the truth about his identity.

The real mission here is to launch Lautner as an action star. He’s certainly handy in fight scenes, and performed many of the stunts himself, including a ride on the bonnet of a fast-moving car. Originally he was supposed to slide off the car at the end of the ride, but during one take Lautner secretly slipped off his safety harness in order to perform a neat tuck and roll somersault onto the ground instead. “The studio wasn’t happy – but then became happy because it looked pretty cool on film,” Lautner says. “But they only let me do it once.”

Lautner’s next big career move is still uncertain. There’s been talk of a movie about playing bendy toy Stretch Armstrong, but the script isn’t there yet, but he has some big ideas and makes no bones about wanting the kind of career enjoyed by Tom Cruise.

“Actually I have met Tom a few times,” he says, “although I wouldn’t say we were best friends. I guess I can technically say I’ve worked with him once. We did this opening skit for the MTV Movie Awards where he was playing his Les Grossman character from Tropic Thunder, and Tom Cruise in a fatsuit was very surreal for me because he’s definitely been at the top of my list growing up and still is today. But those are some mighty, mighty shoes to fill. I would give anything to have a tenth of the career that Tom has.”

He certainly has some of Cruise’s obsessive drive. Preparation for Abduction included poring over the work of Cruise, Matt Damon and Harrison Ford, and this inaugural film of his production company, Quick Six, cannily focuses on things teenagers would like to see – a teenager besting his dad in a martial arts fight, a teenager driving a cool car and a teenager kissing Lily Collins. In real life, Collins (the daughter of Phil Collins, and well known on US TV) and Lautner were supposed to have been an item until last week, but Lautner clearly believes in keeping the mystery of romance alive. “We’re really good friends,” he says, then winks, and refuses to be drawn any further.

Abduction has just opened worldwide, but a sequel is already in the pipeline. When fellow Twilight heartthrob Robert Pattinson took a swing at leading man status, Remember Me barely lingered long enough to clear its budget, while Kristen Stewart’s impersonation of Joan Jett in The Runaways made a swift exit towards the DVD shelves.

Accompanying adults may note that Abduction’s problems begin with the title: there isn’t a kidnapping in the film. It would have been more accurate to call the film “Abdominals” since Lautner’s are generously showcased. “Actually, the original script had even more scenes, probably about five or six but they didn’t make sense so it got cut down,” Lautner says.

He’s only 19 but Lautner has been in the business for 12 years, ever since his martial arts instructor persuaded him to audition for a fast food advert. He didn’t get the part, but he persisted and when he was ten, his entire family relocated from Michigan to Los Angeles. TV and film roles followed, including Steve Martin’s Cheaper By the Dozen 2. When he got the role of Jacob Black in Twilight, he was still a small skinny kid, and had to wear a waist-length wig, which he hated. “It was always getting in my mouth,” he complains quietly. Halfway through the second film, however, Jacob became a fully fledged werewolf and he got to chop it off: apparently werewolves are hairy, but they do not style themselves after Cher.

He says the Twilight franchise has “changed everything”, bringing a large following incluidng one girl who got his autograph inked onto her arm. “This girl in Australia came up and showed me her arm with a massive Wolfpack tattoo on it, and asked me to write my name underneath. I was a bit suspicious about it and later on Kristen Stewart said to me, ‘I bet you that girl’s going to get your signature tattooed.’ Sure enough, the next day it was all over the internet that this girl had my signature tattooed to her arm.”

Like Jacob Black, Lautner is polite, earnest and has almost fluorescently white teeth. He talks a lot about “amazing journeys” and “passion” in the manner of a Miss America contestant but also does rather sweet things like heading out into the London rain to pose and sign autographs for fans waiting outside the hotel. If he’s ambivalent about the attention – “you have to plan simple things, and going to movie theatres and shopping malls are not a good idea” – he’s smart enough not to complain.

“Twilight coming to an end is a very bittersweet feeling,” he acknowledges. “But as an actor I want to be able to challenge myself to play a wide variety of roles.”

And although filming on Twilight has finished, he points out that his farewell to Jacob Black is going to be a long one: “My last day was kind of emotional, because yeah – we’ve spent a long time playing those characters and spending so much time together,” he says. “But the good news is that we will be promoting the film together for another year and a half.”