TAYLOR LAUTNER’S ENTIRE ADOLESCENCE HAS BEEN DEVOTED TO FILMING AND PROMOTING THE TWILIGHT SERIES. NOW THE YOUNG ACTOR, WHO STARS IN THIS FALL’S ABDUCTION, CAN FINALLY FOCUS HIS ATTENTION ON A FAR BIGGER PROJECT: ANSWERING THE QUESTION, WHO IS TAYLOR LAUTNER?

PHOTOGRAPHY STEVEN KLEIN
STYLING NICOLA FORMICHETTI
TEXT ELLIOTT DAVID

The door handles to the hotel suite are locked with flex-cuffs, those plastic restraints used in riot situations, so to gain entrance the doors would have to be bashed off their hinges, which is a very real possibility. Inside the room, Taylor Lautner and Twilight co-star Kristen Stewart are being shielded by security guards likely paid enough to take bullets for them—and certainly trained and briefed for it. Stampeding their way to the other side: two thousand Brazilian girls who’ve somehow discovered not only in which hotel the two megastars are giving press interviews, but the precise room. This battalion of tweens overtook hotel security and was making its way up through the staircase. “And that was the moment Kristen and I looked at each other, like, What do they want? Let’s say two thousand of them just bust into this room, what are they going to do?”

Lautner tells me all this with effortless charm and earnest innocence. Within minutes of meeting him, you can tell he’s completely authentic, totally genuine, just a great kid. Lautner is destined to be a permanent marquee in big-industry Hollywood for the foreseeable future, a phase he enters and a fact he solidifies this fall with September’s Abduction, a sort of teenaged Bourne Identity action thriller created by his own production company, Quick Six, and November’s Breaking Dawn – Part 1, the first half of the final (finally) Twilight installment.

Click here for the full cover story from VMAN 23 The Archetypes Issue, on sale now.

KEYWORDS: nicola formichetti, Steven Klein, Taylor Lautner, VMAN 23 The Archetypes Issue