Monday, January 4, 2010

New Kristen Prout Interview - Discusses Eclipse Audition, Filming & More



Full Interview Here but I've included a few of my fave parts with links to other blogs and info related to what she is talking about. Enjoy!

Nineteen-year-old Canadian born actress Kirsten Prout has been making a name for herself in film and television, since getting bitten by the acting but at the very young age of two. After her feature film debut in 2005 as Abby, sidekick to Jennifer Garner's character in the superhero flick Elektra, she went on to play Amanda, the girl-next-door love interest for Kyle on the ABC Family drama Kyle XY.
This June, Kirsten Prout will be in her most visible project to date, as vampire Lucy in the highly anticipated The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. In the third installment of the popular film franchise, her character is seen in flashbacks that give insight into the backstory of Jasper (Jackson Rathbone) and how he was created.


Q: How did you get involved with The Twilight Saga: Eclipse? Was it just a regular audition?

Kirsten: Yeah, it was just a regular audition. I had just come off of two films, and it was after Kyle XY, which was a television show I worked on for three years. I had been working on it for so long and, before that, I hadn't taken a real break because I had been working steadily since I was 10 years old. So, at the end of Kyle XY, which also happen to coincide with the end of my high school career, I decided to go off to University and leave the industry. I went for a year to McGill University and I majored in English literature, and I took all my advanced classes that I prepared for in high school, and I had a great time there. I got straight A's and was on the honor roll. But then, when I came back to Vancouver during the summer, I went for an audition because it was what I was used to doing, and I booked it. And then, I booked something right after that was a mini-series that would shoot into the school year. So, at that point, I decided to put off going back to University.

I had just come off of two shows and, in between filming them, I had gone for Eclipse. I read for a different vampire, called Bree, who is a brunette with short, short hair that is 13 years old and completely not me, but I went for the audition just because it was a big project. I can tell you that I've never felt that level of nervousness in an audition room, in my whole career. I had read the books, but it hadn't really sunk in what a huge phenomenon Twilight was. I went into it and it was an important audition, but I wasn't really nervous. I was just focusing on my work, but a lot of people were just so stressed out. I went to the audition room, and then I heard back about the audition that I was wrong for the character, but they wanted me to come back for another vampire that was essentially the same size role and everything, except she had long blonde hair, was extremely pale and was older. So I went in, did one audition and a week later, I got a call and then showed up on set. It was pretty rapid. I only had one audition for it because I'd already auditioned for another character and they'd seen what I could do.

IESB: How secretive were they with you, when you were auditioning? Did you get to read actual scenes?

Kirsten: No. The technique that they used for the audition was that they made the scenes exact transcripts from the book. It was very strange to audition with them because they were written to be read and they weren't adapted yet. They didn't give the screenplay out. So, the audition side was just reading a page of Twilight and reading the lines that were interspersed between the descriptions. That's what it was like. They could never distribute that. Even when I got the job, the secrecy was so high in the Twilight world.

IESB: While you were shooting, did you have any experiences with the paparazzi?


Kirsten: Oh, yeah. The first day that Jackson came into work, he almost tripped on the stairs, coming out of his house, because there were so many photographers that he couldn't even see. The circus around all the trailers and everything was crazy. They had giant black dividers to keep paparazzi out. On the first day, they took down all the signage and blocked everything out. All the actors had to wear bathrobes to cover their wardrobe in between scenes. It was really intense.

I was born and raised in Vancouver, and I've done a lot of film work in Vancouver. I worked with Jennifer Garner on Elektra and there was a lot of paparazzi on that as well. But, Vancouver has changed a lot since Twilight. It's changed the whole media culture there. We didn't used to have paparazzi. You'd get five, tops. And then, on Twilight, all of a sudden it was like, "Where did all these photographers come from?" They were hiding everywhere. There were hundreds, just waiting. It's part of the whole phenomenon of Twilight. You have to just take it as it comes because it's just nuts.

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