Several fansites had the chance to talk with Booboo Stewart and Julia Jones in a phone interview a while back. A few hours ago we posted our interview with Booboo. Here is the interview we did with Julia. Again, we’d like to thank Summit for the opportunity and Julia and Booboo for speaking with us!
Fansites: Leah generally is perceived as such an angry character by fans, but I think we can all agree that there’s also a level of sadness to her. And so I was just curious as to how you played the difference between the anger and the sadness that she might feel to give her a little bit more depth.
Julia: That’s a good question. It’s very Breaking Dawn appropriate. I think one of the big differences that you see in Leah from Eclipse to Breaking Dawn is that she’s able to shed a lot of her anger and express her sadness which is sort of like a step in the direction towards healing. Jacob really feels like he’s given her an opportunity to do that by letting her stay and be in his pack. And it sort of through that and through their relationship that Leah is able to shed some of the anger and get the weight of the things that were making her sad off of her chest.
Fansites: Now that we’ve seen small clips of Breaking Dawn and one scene between you and Jacob, what did you tap into in order to develop Leah? Because she seems to be much better developed in this movie than previously. And is there any life experience that you brought to the role, or do you feel that you were able to express Leah better in this movie than maybe you have in the past?
Julia: Definitely. Well, I don’t know if it’s a question of being able to express her better in this movie than in Eclipse, it’s just that she’s expressing such different sides of herself and she’s expressing a lot more of herself. So in that way I suppose it was an opportunity to express her better. But I think that a lot of her pain – I think that anger is sort of a cover for pain and a lot of times people who are really angry are feeling sad and hurt underneath it. And rather than express sadness and hurt, it kind of comes out in anger and sort of layers of that. And so I think that she just in this really needed to – she really needed Jacob in a way that was interesting for me as an actor, because I don’t have a relationship that like theirs. I don’t – it was hard to relate to, and fortunately, because you get to play these characters for so long, you get to a point where you really are just stepping into them where I look at Taylor and I don’t see Taylor. I see Jacob, and I see this person where, as Leah, she really needs him to accept her and to let her stay and to understand her. And so I really relied a lot on the script and on the material and on the book to imagine what it would be like for her. Because it’s such an unusual – it’s an inhuman experience to have.
Fansites: You said in a previous interview that all your scenes in this movie are with Taylor Lautner. How is that different from filming with the entire wolf pack in previous movies?
Julia: (Laughing) COMPLETELY different in every way! It’s really like opposite ends of the spectrum, because the wolf pack scenes are so – there are so many boys and there’s so much energy and it’s so loud and it’s so chaotic and it’s sort of fun and crazy. And the scenes with just Taylor and Booboo are quiet like sort of intimate, serious scenes for the most part. And there’s this sort of sense of weightiness and a heaviness in the scenes with Jacob and Seth because there’s all this real drama and tension. It’s like life or death. It’s very serious in Breaking Dawn in the scenes with those guys. Verses with the wolf pack a lot of it’s just fun and playing sports games and joking around. But then it gets very serious, of course, when we actually leave. A lot of drama.
Fansites: I was curious about your take on the Jacob/Leah/Renesmee triangle. It’s been hinted at by Stephenie Meyer and others and I was wondering if you portrayed the character in Breaking Dawn with that awareness or you tried to ignore it?
Julia: Yeah, totally. That doesn’t really come up quite yet. It’s just sort of beginning in the first part of Breaking Dawn. But I was very aware of and it was very complex actually, Leah’s feelings and reactions to having this child around and what it meant about her relationship with Jacob. And also I think a really big subtext thing is her questioning what’s going to happen to her in her life. Is she going to be able to have children? And I think that Renesmee sort of triggers a lot of those questions for her. And also she’s still close to Jacob and that somebody that he still cares for – and this is true of the wolf pack in general, but I think particularly in Breaking Dawn as it pertains to Leah and Jacob. They’re just so close that Renesmee is very close to her and means a lot to her in between the lines.
Fansites: Given the dynamic change in Breaking Dawn with you and the rest of wolf pack, has that changed how you bonded with the wolf pack over the course of the different films?
Leah: I don’t think so. I am still as close or closest to- you know, Chaske Spencer and Alex Meraz are two of my closest friends. And we have stayed in close touch even when we weren’t filming and throughout filming. The way that we filmed it, a lot of the wolf pack stuff in Breaking Dawn was filmed earlier in shooting, and then later on it was sort of more Jacob, Leah, and Seth stuff. So it didn’t really affect the dynamics of the wolf pack in the beginning because they really just weren’t really around for parts of it. My overall experience filming Breaking Dawn was incredibly different because they weren’t around for a lot of it, but I don’t think it affected our dynamic at all.
Fansites: Prior to getting the script, was there a particular scene or an interaction that you definitely wanted to make it to the film, and I don’t know if you can tell us or not if it actually made it into the film.
Julia: I was really excited to see the scene where Leah screams at Bella for hurting Jacob. I think I was excited about that because I spent all of Eclipse being so angry at Bella and so to actually get to scream at her was going to be like really fun and exciting. And I’m not going to answer about whether it’s in there or not!
Fansites: Stephenie Meyer once said that if she was to make another chapter of the Twilight saga in the perspective of another character it would be Leah’s. Did you get to speak with her about Leah and get any new information that we never read in the books?
Julia: Not so much actually. One of the kind of wonderful things about getting to work on a movie or franchise that’s based on a book is, of course, that there’s so much material to sort of draw from that’s not in the script. And then additionally, with Twilight we had Stephenie on set pretty much every day. There’s so many characters that we all kind of do our work and come to work with an idea of what’s going on and the whole inner life of the character. And then if you need any help or if you have any questions, not only do you have a director and producers and other actors around there, but you also have Stephenie Meyer who wrote the books. I know that that was really helpful for a lot of people, and I have maybe one or two really brief exchanges with her about Leah that have been positive and given me confidence. But I haven’t talked to her at all about anything going forward.
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