The Twilight Scenes Taylor Lautner Regretted Filming
Life is, unavoidably, a PowerPoint presentation of regrets and embarrassments backed up to the hard drive inside your mind, playing on a loop and constantly tacking new slides to the end as if to say "and another thing – your left nostril was roughly 75 percent booger during that last Tinder date and also you mispronounced 'fettuccine.'" The trick, as far as anyone can tell, is to try to minimize the number of humiliations available for replay, or at least make sure that you're not being shot by a professional film crew while they're happening.
Which brings us to Taylor Lautner, the "Twilight" series lead and inhabitant of the second largest number of teenage vision boards circa 2009. At the start of his career, Lautner was perhaps best-known for his work in "The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D" and "Cheaper by the Dozen 2." Lautner's role as Jacob in "Twilight," however, catapulted him into a new stratosphere of stardom and ended up making him an international celebrity. He was still a young buck of 16 summers when that big screen lycanthropic life came calling, but virtually the whole world soon came to know him as the damp, shirtless third point in the supernatural romance genre's most iconic love triangle.
And while landing a gig turning into a wolf in movies was inarguably good to Lautner, keeping him employed across five feature films, there's one aspect of the work that the actor has been vocal about disliking. The long and short of it is, he'd very much like to wear a shirt from now on.
For Taylor Lautner, less shirts meant more hurts
This isn't necessarily a fresh take but the "Twilight" star was never a fan of having to walk around topless while people pointed cameras at him.
"I worked hard to get in shape for this role," Lautner stated at the time, which roughly coincided with the release of "New Moon," and preceded his appearances in "Eclipse" and the "Breaking Dawn" duology. "My motivation was the movie and the fans, but I don't want to become known as just a body. If I had to choose, I would never take my shirt off again in a movie, but I guess that's not very realistic. I certainly won't be asking to do it, though." Based on this interview, Lautner seems to have never been all that interested in appearing shirtless in the "Twilight" films, even as they were being filmed.
He then extrapolated on this thought in an interview published about a year later by Us Weekly, telling the publication, "It's actually quite uncomfortable knowing so many people are seeing [my body]. It's embarrassing." The fact that he ended up mentioning this on multiple occasions suggests this wasn't just something he once thought of off-handedly, but an ongoing issue underlying his career in its early years.
Taylor Lautner regretted his shirtless scenes throughout his career
Taylor Lautner's displeasure with his shirtless appearances in the "Twilight" films persisted throughout more-or-less the entirety of the franchise's run, becoming something of a standard subject in interviews with the Jacob actor as the series progressed. For example, during a 2010 conversation with Us Weekly, Lautner recounted how he refused to remove his shirt in the film "Valentine's Day," finding the context entirely unrealistic. "I said, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa. Time out. He's going to take off his shirt in the middle of school? No, no, no.'"
Then, in 2011, Lautner told MTV that he fought for his total shirtless time in the first "Breaking Dawn" movie to be as minimal as possible. "There was some negotiating for sure, oh yeah. There were more [shirtless scenes] when I read the original script, trust me," Lautner said. "And I got it down to a very, very small amount, which I was so happy with."
Finally, following the conclusion of the final "Twilight" film, Lautner told Express.co.uk that the series coming to end meant that he would only ever take his shirt off again on-camera if a movie's script truly justified such a moment.
With the benefit of hindsight? Yes, maybe it was gauche and bizarre for a film studio to pay an underaged boy to get jacked and take his shirt off on camera. Darn it all, it was uncomfortable while it was happening, even without the benefit of hindsight. Maybe there's a lesson to be learned here. No idea what it could be, but maybe there is. "Don't work out and you won't be embarrassed by people thinking you're attractive," possibly.