Before New Moon and Twilight, Robert Pattinson nearly gave up on acting. His role in Little Ashes, where he plays Salvador Dali, saved him–

I did that before Twilight and I was going to give up acting before that. I did the casting about two years before to play Lorca and they said ‘we found a Spanish guy who looks just like Lorca to play Lorca’. Do you want to play Dali? Which is like the opposite part to Lorca. They told me four days before shooting. I was just so disinterested in acting at the time. I just thought ‘oh, a three-month vacation in Spain, okay’. I went there and it was so intense the whole time and everybody was speaking Spanish and I don’t speak a word of Spanish. The whole crew was Spanish. I was the only English person there for the majority of the time. It gave me a reason to really focus on the script and the research to a ridiculous degree. It was the only thing I did for the entire time

Pattinson also loves New Moon, and can’t wait to show off his acting chops–

The second one’s my favorite book and I think you can really change the character at the end. He’s distraught and every ounce of confidence he has in the first one is gone by the end of the second one by his reappearance at the end when he’s essentially committing suicide. He can really completely change his image, like, nothing in the rest of the books. I can create something quite special with it, I think… if they let me. (laughs.)

This is a great interview from November 2008, and it was dug up recently for the “news” that Robert Pattinson will be making an album. Check out the whole thing over at TeenHollywood.com. [image via Flickr]

UPDATE: We tracked down the source of this awesome poster!