Robert Pattinson - New Heartthrob?

Due to my slack publishing of posts, this is now a little, well a lot, behind the times.

There is a new Hollywood heartthrob us women are being told we should be swooning over and he is Robert Pattinson.

No matter that he is barely out of those difficult teenage years and was brought to our attention in his role as a brooding teen vampire. Robert is THE new creature of lust for every woman and teenage girl.

Who? You may well ask.

If you have been living in a box on a remote island for the past few months, calmly setting up camp for when the recession has its merciless grip on all our lives, then you can be forgiven for completely missing the new boy. And if you haven't, well, you too can be forgiven as you probably haven't caught Twilight fever either.

Twilight is the film based on the first book of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series in which Pattinson stars as the moody looking but glitteringly beautiful Edward Cullen. (If you missed in the cinema, you can catch it on DVD in the UK from April.) The series centres around the life of Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), your average American teenage girl who moves across America to live with her Dad in Forks, Washington and falls for the local High School hotty, Edward Cullen. Thing is, he's a vampire. And then there's, Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), who helps create a bit of fantastical twisted love triangle. (I won't say anymore than that for now in case you decide to go away and read the books. They're not as bad as they sound. Honest.)

So what's Pattinson's appeal? The 22 year old is becoming the new big (British) Hollywood heartthrob and has been tipped by some as the next Jude Law. But it's not necessarily conventional Hollywood looks that are the attraction.

There is certainly something about the new boy. Being cast for Edward Cullen though, is a pivotal moment for Pattinson. It has launched him out of acting obscurity and into the bedrooms of thousands of teenage girls across the world. The Twilight premieres were littered with screaming girls desperate for a glimpse of the new poster boy. Something that Pattinson is reported to have found quite alien and strange.

Having read the Twilight series before there were any plans for the films, I had created a definitive Edward in my own head. As with most(all?) books, when a film version is commissioned there's a great danger of ruining the characters for the readers. I was more than a little fearful that such would be the case with Twilight. Yet somehow Pattinson has managed to embody the Edward Cullen of my imagination. Not to mention the Edward Cullen of several thousand others. Now that is some good casting. Hats off to Catherine Hardwicke and her team.

Despite having been cast as the central love interest in a teen fantasy film receiving phenomenal responses, it's not clear what Robert's appeal is. It certainly took time before I was prepared to join this bandwagon of 'Robert is gorgeous'. He's just not obviously attractive. Which is maybe what brings the parallels to Jude Law and (to a lesser extent) Johnny Depp. Both of these actors are not necessarily men of conventional Hollywood sex appeal. Neither is Pattinson.

Even the magazines were late jumping onto Pattinson. It was only after scores of screaming fans stood outside the premiers that many women's magazines took any notice of the new boy. It's not that Pattinson hasn't been in films before - he's been acting for years, using little jobs to pay his way through his A levels - it's just he's not necessarily been an object of desire until now.

Robert played Cederic Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 2004. A quick google image search brings up pictures that leave you wondering whether this could really be the same person. Cederic Diggory was not hot. Edward Cullen is.

So maybe it's the characters that make Pattinson sexy? Edward is a character that is meant to be gorgeous. But then explore what other projects Robert has worked on and we could be on to something. He ambles along a fine line of sexiness. As some characters he is sex on fire, as others he's just not. But this tottering is not unique to Pattinson. The same goes for Johnny Depp; Sweeney Todd, fit. Willy Wonka, decidedly not.

But fickle attractiveness aside, Robert Pattinson is a young actor to look out for.

If you need a fresh fix of Robert before he can finish New Moon the second Twilight film, look out for Little Ashes, where he plays Surrealist artist, Salvador Dali.