Robert Pattinson was set on pursuing a music career like all of his English friends had. Even after playing the doomed Cedric Diggory in two Harry Potter films, he couldn't take acting too seriously.

But a gig as Salvador Dali in the yet-to-be-released Little Ashes gave him an appreciation for how creatively rewarding the craft could be. He applied that new sense of purpose to Twilight's Edward Cullen, a teenage vampire who only drinks animal blood and, after nearly a century of undead life, falls in love with a living girl.

"In the book, Edward is every single perfect guy rolled into one, and obviously there's no way that that can exist," the friendly Pattinson observes.

"So it's a canvas in the reader's head. The initial option I saw was to just stand there and have a six-pack, be very mysterious and not say so much. But who wants to watch that? It's totally boring, like looking at a fridge magnet.

"I get why girls like it, but when you break it down, there are so many contradictions to this character. The whole thing, to me, was like an analogy to being a junkie. He's given up the worst kind of addiction, but he knows that even the slightest temptation could make him go back on it. So he makes his world smaller and smaller and smaller, until it gets so small that there's no point in living anyway."

Since he was tapped to play the idealized Edward, girls have been liking Rob a lot, too ... except, he says, in the close-up and personal manner that really counts.

"I haven't been having any more luck with the ladies, actually," Pattinson admits. "Especially in L.A., because actors have such a bad rep here. Everyone you try to talk to, it has the opposite effect; they figure you just kind of chat up everybody. Which is kind of true of actors, actually."

Calling himself a musician would probably have a similar effect.

"I've been playing gigs since I was 15," says Pattinson, who sings and plays piano and guitar. "But now I'd look like a tacky actor who wants to play music. I'd like to make an album, but I don't intend for anyone to buy it."