“It’s bittersweet,” Kellan Lutz, who plays Robert Pattinson’s Twilightbrother Emmett Cullen, told us during Wednesday night’s Breaking Dawn—Part 2 celebration at Comic-Con, kicking off the franchise’s final tour at the fan convention in San Diego. “I’m really just trying to soak it all in. There are probably a thousand fans that came out. It really is just special to be part of the films and to come here, where the fans just love and love and love on us, just like they have since day one.”
When asked to recall his favorite Comic-Con memory, Lutz answered with the kind of ease and confidence fitting of a former Calvin Klein underwear model: “The Slutz for Lutz.” In response to a blank expression from your blogger, Lutz explained, “When I saw [that fans] were making shirts that said, ‘Slutz for Lutz,’ I thought, ‘I love that!’ I think I’ll see a few this year. But it’s great seeing the fans that come year after year. They’re not fans anymore. They’re our friends.” As if on cue, a swarm of “friends” encircled Lutz asking for photographs. Later in the night, it would take the actor close to 20 minutes to retrieve a Butterfinger cupcake from a nearby table at the Hard Rock Hotel’s poolside lounge as he fielded more “friendly” interruptions.
In addition to being bittersweet, the event had an eerie Twilight feel to it thanks to trees backlit with red lights, Breaking Dawn—Part 2 trailers projected on the façade of a nearby building, and a heavy fog pumped onto the terrace, out of which cast members Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, Ashley Greene, and miscellaneous members of the Cullen family appeared and disappeared all night. (Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and Taylor Lautner were likely resting up for Thursday afternoon’s Hall H panel.) It felt more like you were standing outside a chic D.J.’d party in Washington (with Pinkberry bar and vampy waitresses in fishnet tights) than at a comic-book-convention party in California. Toward the end of the night, as the smoke cleared, we spotted an unlikely attendee mingling among the Twihards: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock.
Spurlock, who released a tribute to this week’s convention in 2011 called Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope, revealed that he was not at the party as aTwilight fan: “I’ve seen a couple of the films. I like the movies but I’m not their demo, I don’t think.” The real reason he was surveying the scene, he joked, was simple: “My plan is to get bitten by a vampire and live forever. I’m looking tonight. I’m all for immortality. People think it would be a drag but I don’t think I agree with that. Think of how many things you put off now that you could suddenly become good at if you had the time. I got a banjo sitting in the corner of my office. If I could practice that for 500 years, I would be a fucking kickass banjo player. One lifetime is a bit of a problem.”
