A very pleasant vampire

INTERVIEW:IF YOU'RE GOING to be stuck with the same face for 350 years then it might as well be the one attached to Peter Facinelli. The American actor, now an unblemished 35, has worked hard over the past decade and a half. He was in the action series Fastlane. He had decent roles in the movie Scorpion Kingand the much-loved Six Feet Under. But, right now, he is indelibly, irrevocably associated with the jaw-droppingly successful Twilightfranchise. A year ago, the first film adaption of Stephenie Meyer's vampire saga emerged and, to the surprise of perplexed adults unaware of the books' enormous cult following, chewed the world's box-offices into bloody pulp.

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, playing dishy vampire and potential inductee, immediately became huge stars. The gorgeously toothy,immaculately blow-dried Facinelli, who plays Pattinson’s impossibly ancient adopted father, also found himself being kicked several rungs up Hollywood’s ladder of prestige.

The second film, New Moon, makes its way to cinemas this weekend and Facinelli admits to being a bit more relaxed about the experience. First time round, the internet was alive with Twilightfans complaining about the casting. This guy's too tall. She's too weedy. He's too English. All that must have been hard on the ego.

“Oh sure. But I knew it was tricky making a film based on a book,” he says. “I understand that you’re never going to please everybody. Everyday you find people saying: ‘He’s not right.’ There were people saying Robert was too ugly. That’s got to be hard when you’re supposed to be playing the most beautiful guy in the world.”

Being a little older and a little more robust, Peter must, surely, have found the criticism easier to shake off. “It’s still hard. You really have to develop a thick skin. You can’t help but be hurt, even if you are a bit older. Eventually you do just have to stop reading the stuff on the internet.”

The Twilightphenomenon – like the High School Musicalcult – crept up on many media observers. Sure, we'd spotted Ms Meyer's books while dashing through airports. Maybe we'd caught the odd feature article explaining how many felt that the stories constituted conservative propaganda for teen chastity. (Mr Pattinson fears that if he gets too intimate with the quick Ms Stewart he will infect her with his vampiric corpuscles.) But few people over the age of 18 – not even Hollywood executives – expected the first movie to be so huge.

“I didn’t know anything about it when they first approached me,” Peter says. “I can still remember the phone call. They said: ‘Do you want to go up for a vampire film?’ I said: ‘No way’. I was thinking blood and guts. But I looked into it and realised that the books really had a fan base. Then I met Catherine Hardwicke and she convinced me.”

Catherine Hardwicke, director of the teen meltdown drama Thirteen, brought an unexpected earthiness to Twilightthat helped ground the fantastic events in reality. Sadly, after "scheduling conflicts", she was not hired for New Moonand Chris Weitz, the more conventional director of The Golden Compass, is now at the helm.

“Yeah, I loved Catherine,” Facinelli says. “I can remember during that first audition she was reading Kristen’s part. She was on the floor and I was bending over her with my hands around her throat. I remember thinking that if anybody walked in they might get the wrong idea.”

I’m sure they wouldn’t. Married with three children, Peter Facinelli could not look more like a white-bread, wholesome American guy. He has the sort of face you’d expect to see smiling out of a 1950s advertisement for razor blades. Spot him a hundred yards away on a gloomy day when you’re not wearing the right glasses and you’d recognise him as an American. Yet he is only one generation from Italy. Raised in working class New York, the son of a waiter, he offers living proof of the power of New World will.

"I grew up in the middle of Queens, which is the furthest you can get from Hollywood without leaving America," he says. "I knew nobody who was an actor. I saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kidon TV one day and I thought: that's what I want to do. That was like telling my parents I wanted to live on Mars."

That’s understandable. If you come to America as a working-class guy, you most likely hope your children will grow up to get steady middle-class jobs. Running away to join the circus is rarely welcomed. Peter duly kept his dreams to himself and allowed his parents to believe his true ambition was to train as a lawyer. He made it into law school, but soon realised he was never going to become Perry Mason.

“The one thing lawyers try hardest to do is stay out of court and that was the only part of it I liked,” he says.

Peter devised a scheme. He enrolled in acting school and told his parents that this was essential training for a lawyer. After all, you need to project and enunciate in court.

"Then I got an acting job while I was still at college and went to California. It took a while for it to sink in with my folks. For the first 10 years they were still expecting me to move back home any day." One imagines they've got the message now. Though Facinelli is not exactly a star, he has worked very steadily on TV and in films since first nabbing roles in the mid-1990s. Flick across the channels and you'll catch him as Gregory in Damages, Dr Cooper in Nurse Jackieor Jimmy in Six Feet Under. Yet, what with that fanatical teen following, the role of Carlisle Cullen – born into Civil War England, a vampire for three centuries – has secured him a different class of fame.

It cannot have been an easy role to prepare for. If you’re playing a cabbie you can drive a yellow car for a few weeks. If you’re playing a cop you can go on a few busts. An ancient vampire is a different prospect altogether.

“I did work quite hard on getting it right,” he says. “But actually the problem was looking like the father of this family. I am not much older in appearance than the other actors. I had to avoid looking like their elder brother. Fortunately, I am a father, so I know how to be like a patriarch. It’s that thing: even if you don’t know what you’re talking about, you have to look like you know what you’re talking about.”

It’s like being a movie director. “Exactly. Yes, that’s it.” So, what with all this adulation, I guess his parents have finally come round. “My dad is still so funny. I’d phone him up and say: ‘I’m working with Danny DeVito’ and he’d say: ‘Who’s that?’. I said I was working with Drew Barrymore and my dad said: ‘Oh really. Is he nice?’ ” Facinelli wags his head and smiles. What a pleasant bloke. I’m sure his pop is very proud.

The Twilight Saga: New Moonis on general release