Interview With the Cast of Twilight

Maggie Grace Wonder Con 2012 by Gage Skidmore (Flickr)

Blueprint Online Interviews Maggie Grace (Irina) and Mia Maestro (Carmen) of Breaking Dawn Part 2 
Photographs via Gretchen Burnton

How did you first learn about your role in the film and what was the audition process like?

Mia Maestro: “It was fairly simple, the audition process. My agent called me and said, ‘there’s this audition for Twilight, do you want to go?’ and I just went in, read the scenes, and that was it. It was super quick, five minutes, and then in a couple of weeks they told me that they had cast me to play Carmen.

Maggie Grace: “Yeah, me too. I mean, it was a pretty simple audition process but I guess they saw a lot of people but we kind of came in towards the end, I think. A lovely, lovely experience. … But when I got the call that I got it, I was super excited. I was with one of my best friends and I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody about it.

Maestro: “Yeah, we had to keep it secret for a long time.”

Grace: “Yeah, like four months or something. But I had to tell her because she was sitting next to me in the car and at the end of the call she had like red marks on her arm because I’d been holding it so tightly.”

How do you personally identify with your individual characters?

Grace: “Oh, I’m exactly the same. If I see a vulnerable, small child I’m like, ‘feed it to the Volturi!’ I mean, pretty much carbon copies, really.”

Do you consider yourself “Twihards?”

Grace: “I have a unique understanding of ‘Twihard-dom’ because I, not unlike Stephenie Meyer I would like to point out, I’m a huge ‘Janeite,’ which is Jane Austen. I was just in her home last week … where I made a ‘holy pilgrimage.’ I also bought a lot of merchandise. I’ve made a fan film, I’ve read all the books, this extends from when I was about 11-years-old, so I do understand the feeling of ownership. Like when they re-cast Darcy, it was a very tumultuous time for me. He was too young. It wasn’t the right Darcy for me. So it was upsetting … I know what it’s like to invest in these things.”

Maestro: “I was not a fan of Twilight at all but then of course the moment they told me I was doing the character I started reading the books. It was quite amazing because they’re pretty much a fast read. Stephenie has this quality in her writing that probably appeals to a lot of teenagers. It’s just very easy. You read them like water, it’s just so gentle and just so quick.”

Grace: “And we didn’t have a script.”

Maestro: “No, so we had to read the books. We had to do all the research about our character from the book.”

Was the script different from the book?

Maestro: “Some things are different but it’s quite faithful to the literature.”

Grace: “Yeah, there’s one main difference that the screenwriter, Melissa, and Stephenie, the author of the books, collaborated on that’s the [one] difference but I thought it was really wonderful and made it much more cinematic in scope.”

Is there anything you want to tell the fans of the movies?

Maestro: “Well, we were just talking about the movie. We saw it the other day, they did a screening for the actors, Maggie and I think it’s the best one by far.”

Grace: “This is the one to see.”

Maestro: “If you haven’t seen any Twilights, this is the one to see. It’s amazing there’s more characters.”

Grace: “There’s more action.”

Maestro: “There’s a lot of action, it’s a love story, it’s a family story, it talks about a community coming to gather to preserve and take care of something they care about, so it has a lot of values.”

Grace: “I think it has a much wider appeal this time around but I think that it will also give closure to the true die-hard fans.”

Maestro: “The ending of the movie is really moving. Just get ready for it. It’s hard to finish such a saga, something that’s been going on for so long, something that’s been portrayed by so many different directors with many different aesthetics, but somehow Bill just managed to wrap it up in just a beautiful way.”

What was your favorite scene to film?

Grace: “I really liked, well I’m a big fan of Michael Sheen’s work, Frost Nixon, and he’s a wonderful actor, so I was excited that my character got to visit the Volturi. Even though I couldn’t see anyone because of the contacts – it was all very blurry.”

Maestro: “One of my favorite scenes to film was when Bella and Edward and Jacob and Renesmee come to the Denali’s house in Alaska, we had a lot of fun doing that scene even though it was the coldest day of the year and we had to be shooting in like minus 10 [degrees] or something just ridiculous.”

Grace: “And vampires don’t shiver.”

Maestro: “Yeah, we could hardly even speak it was so cold.”

Grace: “But everyone’s least favorite was probably the battle scene because that was about six weeks in a cattle facility outside of Baton Rouge.”

Maestro: “I think it was really my least favorite one to shoot, but seeing it, the way it came out, it’s really gorgeous so it really paid off. It’s really epic, it’s so beautifully lit. Garggiano Ar’DePit did the most beautiful job lighting the scene.

-Alexandra Dersch, Editor-in-Chief