“Vampires are very sexy right now,” says 22-year-old Jake Abel. “It’s kind of disgusting. It’s kind of a bandwagon.”
Nevertheless, if things had gone differently, the tall, strapping, blue-eyed Abel might have found himself at the center of the current Twilight-ignited storm of teenage-vampire mania: Abel actually auditioned to play Edward Cullen in Twilight (2008)—the part that would eventually go to Robert Pattinson.
Needless to say, he did not get the role. “I don’t want to say I sabotaged myself, but I have a tendency to go against the grain,” says Abel of his tryout,...