Updated March 26, 2026, 10:19 a.m. ET
For Robert Pattinson, there is no “Team Jacob.”
The onetime “Twilight” leading man, who played vampiric heartthrob Edward Cullen in the Stephenie Meyer adaptation, said in a recent interview that a debate over who was better, his character or Taylor Lautner’s werewolf Jacob, was contrived.
In the film series, Jacob was also vying for the heart of leading lady Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart). The Team Jacob vs. Team Edward debate animated an army of teens (and some adults) during the film franchise’s heyday.
During a press tour promoting his new film “The Drama,” Pattinson and his costar, Zendaya, were asked which team they were on. “I’m Team Edward all day, let’s go,” Zendaya, 29, told an interviewer for the French outlet Canal +.
“No one’s Team Jacob,” Pattinson quipped. “That was just a marketing thing.” When the interviewer shot back that she, in fact, was Team Jacob, the “Die My Love” actor, 39, laughingly responded “sorry” and “that’s crazy.”
“Yeah, I need to get, you know, the merch,” Zendaya added. “I need to get the whole thing.”
While Pattinson has had a complicated emotional relationship with the role that made him famous, once joking to Variety that he “stopped mentally progressing around the time when I started doing those movies,” he has since developed a soft spot for the films.
“It’s a fascinating second wave of people appreciating it, which is kind of cool,” he told USA TODAY in 2019. “I think when anything becomes a massive phenomenon, there’s always people who get annoyed because it’s just everywhere. But now it seems like a retro thing: the soundtrack, the fashion. It’s like, ‘Oh, that’s so late 2000s.’
“I think the only scary part was right in the thick of it all, when it was very, very intense. Now the intensity has died down and it’s just very warm memories,” he said.
