Edward Cullen #53 of EW's 'Greatest Characters of the Last 20 Years'


Who says vampies are scary? Sometimes they're just dreamy teen idols.

The brooding, sparkle-skinned of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, played by Robert Pattinson in the franchise, is the poster on the teenage girls' walls and quite possibly the picture on their mothers' and grandmothers' nightstands. "Maybe Edward would not be the best boyfriend," Meyer told Entertanment Weekly in 2008, "because he is such a tortured soul. But you also couldn't just be his friend becasue he is terribly sexy and charismatic." Added Pattinson, "If you played it straight out manic-depressive, every young girl watching it would have been like, 'Um, I don't know about that'. So I tried to make it as much as possible like a 17-year-old guy who had this purgarotry inflicted on him."