Desperate to see your favourite Twilight stars in The Hunger Games? Okay, it was never going to happen, but one of Twilight’s biggest stars, Kellan Lutz, told Insider.com that he loved The Hunger Games script and was desperate to star in the movie. However, he was told in no uncertain terms by the ‘powers that be’ that there couldn’t be a ‘crossover’ between the two franchises.
US Weekly claimed that Lutz wanted the part of Gale, who is now played by Liam Hemsworth.
A source told the magazine: ‘Producers told him they didn’t want anyone from Twilight.’
Lutz was born in North Dakota on 15 March 1985 to a fairly large household – he has six brothers and one sister. However, despite all his many siblings, he still managed to stand out – and was in fact nicknamed Krazy Kellan from his family members.
Lutz didn’t know why, but he was obsessed with signing his autograph as a youngster. He remembers ‘just having fun doing it for no reason’. ‘I’d always want to sign a cheque when I was younger, it’s like I was practising,’ he added. Good thing too, because the young hunk actor has certainly had to sign a lot of autographs recently.
Moving ‘around the Midwest and landing in Arizona’, where his mother re-married, Lutz worked incredibly hard at high school in a bid to make sure he could attend a university of some standing. ‘I had so many siblings that it was a financial issue, as far as going to a better school, because of all the boys. So, however hard you worked in school and the scholarships you got, that’s where you could go. We had limitations, so I worked my butt off to get to any school in California just because my father had been living there since I was six.
‘I really wanted to get close to my father because I never really had much of a relationship with him, I’d see him once or twice a year. So my plan worked and I ended up getting a lot of scholarships for a lot of schools there, and I chose Orange County’s Chapman University to attend. The school was great and they gave me the most money. I was going there for chemical engineering – it’s kind of crazy, but I love chemistry and engineering.’
Lutz earned some money in LA doing modelling. He had done some modelling work in Arizona, but he found that in LA it was a lot different: ‘I’d been modelling since I was 13 or 14, to make extra money. Once I got to LA, the modelling market was a lot bigger, so I was like: “Wow, you can make this much money? That’s 10 times as much money as in Arizona!”’
While Lutz would eventually work for Abercrombie & Fitch, and has recently been the face of Calvin Klein, it’s not something he’d ever considered as his ultimate career move. But, while he was sure modelling wasn’t where he saw his future, neither was chemical engineering.
He had done ‘a bit of theatre stuff for my church, growing up, like every year doing the Christmas play and Oliver Twist, and fun stuff like that’ – but he thought it was just something to pass the time and not take seriously as a career move. However, being surrounded by so many wannabe actors in LA piqued his interest, and he began taking classes.
In a weird way, Lutz was always destined to play a vampire. He told his agent at the start of 2007 that he should be told of any scripts coming up that featured marines, vampires or boxers. When casting for Twilight began, Lutz was in Africa filming the Generation Kill TV series.
‘At the time, my agent was sending me out for Edward, the main character. I read it and it was just too hard to put myself on tape because I was in a third-world country and, if you sent a DVD, there was probably a one in 10 chance that it would get to America. I don’t care about being the lead of everything. I just like playing characters that really grab me. So, when I saw the character of Emmett, I thought he would just be such a cool character to play.’
But the project was already cast, meaning it looked like Lutz had missed out on his dream role. Dejected, he decided to take a break from acting after his work on Generation Kill ended. He wanted to take a short time off to focus on spending some time with his family and friends.
However, he was to get a second bite at starring in Twilight. Lutz told an interviewer: ‘The actor who was playing Emmett fell through, for whatever reason. So, I said: “Get me in there!”. The next day, my agent said: “Your audition is tomorrow. If they like you, they’re going to fly you to Oregon the next day.” So I went to the audition and five of my other friends were there and, in the end, they liked me and this other guy. Then, it came down to them liking me, just a little bit more. I really think Ashley Greene put in a good word and said I was awesome to work with!’
‘I had a lot of people rooting for me. So, they flew me out to Oregon that night, and I had to audition for Catherine Hardwicke at 8 o’clock the next morning. It just happened so fast, and I only packed one outfit. Catherine liked me a lot and said I was her perfect Emmett! I was so excited because I was playing a vampire, I loved the script and I loved Emmett.’
Lutz said he didn’t really realise what Twilight was about. ‘I honestly didn’t realise it had this huge cult following, and that there were so many books. I was just excited that someone wrote an amazing script that was so sensual. It’s beautiful. It’s a love story about a vampire and a human girl, and what they can and cannot do. It was just really cool. So, once I found out that there were books, I did myself some reading and I fell in love with the whole series.’
Lutz stars in all five of the Twilight movies and is now seen as one of Hollywood’s rising stars. Maybe Lionsgate might change their mind, and feature Kellan in the sequels!
That would certainly be music to Lutz’s ears – he recently stated: ‘I love the script, love the movie, everything about it. I feel like Twilight’s kind of more girly, and on the romance side and lacks the action, and then Hunger Games is very much an action packed movie that lacks some of the romance. I got hooked reading all those books. I remember before they ever started making a movie, I was like, “I would love to be a part of this”.’ When asked if he would like to star in the sequel Catching Fire, he answered, ‘That’d be really special.’
Katniss (derived from an edible plant called Katniss) is Suzanne Collins’s heroine in The Hunger Games, who lives in poverty with her family. When she was 11 her father was killed in a mine explosion, a tragic event which caused his mother to sink into depression and leave the burden of looking after the family on the young Katniss’s shoulders. Desperate for food, she began raking though bins in the more prosperous part of town. Starving, she is saved by Peeta, who gives her some bread. Afterwards, she begins heading to the woods to start hunting for food, and it’s there she meets Gale.
On the fateful day of the Reaping she steps in to volunteer for a chance to compete in the tournament after her sister is originally selected. A keen hunter and skilled in survival techniques, Katniss overcomes the odds by not just surviving against deadly and better-trained opposition, she defies the rules by winning the tournament with Peeta.
Talking about the character, Gary Ross said: ‘She is just such a compelling character, and her struggle and her evolution is so beautiful. You see the character emerge and grow and have so much strength – she’s a very important character for kids, because she starts off purely in a fight for survival, and by the end of the story, she learns there’s so much more. There are things more important than merely surviving – like, what does it mean to actually live?’
Katniss is played by Jennifer Lawrence, who said: ‘I was a huge fan of the books before I even really knew about the movies. I met with Gary Ross, and we had a very long, nice meeting before the audition. And then by the time the audition came around, we were familiar with each other.’
Talking about how much fun she had playing the role, she added: ‘There’s lots of training, but it’s actually really fun. I’ve done archery, rock climbing, tree climbing and combat and running and vaulting. Also yoga and things like that, to stay cat-like.’