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Sometimes the best thing about being part of a massive cultural phenomenon — one that generated several EW covers over the years — is not being the leading star.

Kellan Lutz shared this bit of wisdom during an Aug. 17 panel with costar Jackson Rathbone at Fan Expo in Chicago, in which the Twilight alum explained why he turned down the offer to audition for the role of Edward Cullen in the Twilight saga, which ultimately went to Robert Pattinson.

“I had been doing Generation Kill in Africa for seven months, so I was something that was very timely and sensitive and a lot of death, a lot of destruction and away from my family,” Lutz began. “So I wasn’t in the best piece of mind. I just wanted peace and joy in my life again. So when that audition came and I read it, I just wasn’t in that sort of mindset.”

Lutz, who played Emmett Cullen across all five Twilight films, explained that when his manager pitched him the role, he reasoned that because Twilight is the first of a series, the actor could go on to do “multiple” movies, which was not as enticing as he hoped.

“I’m like, that’s even worse like to play this depressing character who I saw him as,” Lutz admitted. “I was like, ‘I know that’s not for me,’ so I passed on it.”

Luckily, that wasn’t the end of Lutz’s Twilight journey.

“Emmett was already cast and then they opened that up again because the actor just didn’t work out,” he recalled. “And when they sent me the lines for Emmett, I read them, there’s like 4 lines, right? They’re all funny, or in my head they’re funny. I was like, ‘Oh this is cool, this guy is cool.’ And I read him in the books and I was like, ‘Yeah, he’s great.’ At least he’s, in my head, the comedic relief. A man of a few words, but they’re funny. And so, I got to eat those up on set whenever I could.”

Rathbone, meanwhile, went a little further in his run for the role of Edward. The actor was one of the four final candidates to play Edward alongside Pattinson, Ben Barnes, and Shiloh Fernandez.

“I was [director] Catherine Hardwick’s favorite, and when they trotted me out, [author, Stephanie Meyer]s like, ‘No, that’s not Edward,” Rathbone recalled, pointing out that Meyer had former Superman actor Henry Cavill in mind for the swoon-worthy role. “And they wanted the Harry Potter guys, so they brought in Cedric Diggory, and now we have Robert!”

Rathbone ultimately starred as Jasper Cullen in the Twilight saga, and the actor asserted that there’s no hard feelings about losing the role to Pattinson.

“I think Robert Pattinson was the correct choice 100%,” he told the Fan Expo crowd. “I really love his performance as Edward. I make fun of him, I tease him because he’s my brother, and I think it’s what we do, you know, we tease each other. We have fun, but like I had a lot of fun doing the audition.”

While the part of Edward Cullen is now synonymous with making Pattinson a household name, the Batman actor has made his aversion to the series well known since the Twilight saga concluded with Breaking Dawn: Part 2 in 2012.

“I love that people keep telling me, ‘Man, Twilight ruined the vampire genre,'” he said in an interview earlier this year. “Are you still stuck on that s—? How can you be sad about something that happened almost 20 years ago? It’s crazy.”

“I find it hard to believe the cultural relevance that these films maintain because they are so old,” the actor reminisced. “The first one was released in 2008, f—!”

Calling the ongoing obsession with the film franchise a “fascinating phenomenon,” Pattinson said, “I can’t believe it. I think this renaissance has emerged in Korea and it’s happened a bit like with K-pop, which took off in Korea but then seduced a young Western population.”