“Kristen [Stewart] and Taylor [Lautner] had to lobby to get this one scene in the film that wasn’t originally in — and I am forever indebted to them for that,” revealed Mike Welch, citing a beloved moment from Stephenie Meyer’s “New Moon” novel. “There’s a scene that’s in the book, the three-way date between Jacob and Bella and Mike, where Mike ends up getting sick, and it’s just very awkward.”
As for how physically ill Welch’s Mike Newton gets in the comic-relief scene, he said we shouldn’t expect projectile vomit or anything. “We’re talking a little bit,” he laughed. “A little sick.”
“We did a lot of improv on set,” Lautner said. “We’d just be in a random forest and, after Jacob transforms [into a wolf], he all of a sudden becomes very agile, and I wanted to show that, because pre-transformation, he’s clumsy. But as soon as he transforms, he’s agile. So we’d be in a random forest, and I’d be looking around going, ‘What can I do to show Jacob’s agility in here?’
“Sometimes [director] Chris [Weitz] would be like, ‘No, Taylor, we don’t want you getting hurt, spraining an ankle,’ ” Lautner recalled. “But I was like, ‘Well, how about I just jump off that and then jump through this?’ And he was like, ‘All right, give it a shot.’ ”
“He unleashed the madness; it was crazy,” Peter Facinelli remembered of the day when Rathbone finally got to display his inner animal and attack Kristen Stewart’s Bella. “It took me and Kellan — non-acting — to hold him back.”
Elizabeth Reaser also got knocked over during the violent take. “Jasper, played by Jackson Rathbone, kinda loses it when Bella cuts herself,” Kellan Lutz recalled. “It’s fun to work with your friends and see a side of them that you really don’t expect. That’s where the acting comes into play. Jackson did an amazing job portraying that scene, and it was fun being my character to try and stop him.”
