Chris Weitz Says Recasting Jacob in New Moon was a Definite Possibility

Director Chris Weitz stepped into the second film of the Twilight series with the main cast in place. Kristen Stewart as Bella, Robert Pattinson as Edward, and the actors playing the Cullen family were all pretty much set in stone. And everyone thought Taylor Lautner was all but certain to reprise his role as Jacob Black. But as director Chris Weitz and producer Wyck Godfrey acknowledged at the New Moon press junket, Lautner's return as Jacob was in fact an uncertainty for a while. Of course everyone who follows the Twilight films knows this is old news, but hearing Weitz and Godfrey now talk about the reasoning behind the possible recasting was, nonetheless, interesting.

"I'd say there was a big possibility that could happen, but I was always convinced that he was going to be able to do it," said Weitz. "The doubts came up because he had very few scenes in the first movie. Also because he's described as being 6'5" in the second book, some reasonable facts that we had to come to grip with. But I like the sort of sweetness of this character in the first movie and I knew that it was easier to take an actor in the direction of anger and rage than it was to find someone who is kind of a hunk or 6'5" Native American and somehow turn him into that very sweet-natured persona that Taylor brings out so well to boot."

"It also became less of an idea once audiences identified with Taylor when they saw Twilight," explained producer Godfrey. "He's in their minds. He is Jacob, you know? So it became less of an idea to recast once people really identified, once the movie opened and people were like, 'Taylor is Jacob.' It certainly helped that he had spent the last eight months really working very hard to kind of physically adapt himself to the role."

As for Lautner, all he could do was work on portraying Jacob to the best of his abilities. "Honestly, I knew where my character went in New Moon and that's all I tried to stay focused on. I couldn't control things outside. I couldn't control the media. But I could control what I was doing to portray Jacob Black correctly. So that's what I stayed focused on the whole entire time."

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