NPR: Can Wizards & Vampires Collect Unemployment? (Rob Mentioned)

With employment numbers stuck in a rut and high school grads among those least likely to land jobs, along comes fresh competition. Do you have any idea how many wizards, werewolves and vampires are going to be out of work soon?

In a few months, Craigslist is going to have all kinds of eye-catching resumes:

SCHOOL ATHLETE (captain of Quidditch team) seeks entry-level position. No degree, but considerable leadership experience. Contact Harry James Potter.

Or:

NIGHT SHIFT SOUGHT by graduate of multiple high schools. If you’re thinking extremely long-term, ask for Edward Cullen.

OK, maybe these characters won’t be stealing jobs from the newly graduated, but what about the actors who will no longer be playing them once their series end? We’ve known little Danny Radcliffe since he was just a wand-wielding tyke. Now, he’s on Broadway, and what’s he doing? Looking for work, appropriately enough, hoping to work his way up from the mailroom in the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

That title is kind of the question for all these young millionaire actors who’ve starred in the Potter and Twilight franchises. It’s hard, after watching them in four or five or eight movies as one character, not to picture them in their most famous roles, even when they’re taking on new ones.

…..

Radcliffe’s onetime fellow wizard Robert Pattinson no doubt thought he’d escaped typecasting when his character, Cedric Diggory, died a horrible death in the fourth Potter film. But there was a fatal flaw in this fatality: Pattinson lept directly from the Potter movies into the Twilight movies. Those end next year, and as vampire Edward Cullen, he can’t die or even age out of the role. He’s stuck forever as a 17-year-old.

After being asked to do little more than glare, coo and sparkle in the Twilight movies, Pattinson’s look is his most distinctive quality, so his attempts to branch out by playing warm-blooded heartthrobs haven’t really redefined him. When he’s, say, sitting out at night in the woods in Water for Elephants, and you see lights move behind him, you can’t help thinking werewolves are stalking him. And when he stands behind Reese Witherspoon with his arms wrapped around her waist, you kind of wish she’d cover up her neck.

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Via Spunk-Ransom, Source