Taylor Lautner

The best thing Taylor Lautner has done on screen is sit on a garage floor. In The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) he and Kristen Stewart pull two motorbikes apart and put them back together, and for a while the film is loose and warm and he is easy company: sunny, uncomplicated, a boy with oil on his hands. Then Stewart comes off a bike and he removes his shirt to dab the blood from her forehead, and the film has found what it really wants from him. There is a good deal more of that, and the garage never comes back.

He was an athlete before he was an actor, a martial artist from the age of six and a junior world champion as a child, and he arrived in films as the small, springy Sharkboy in The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl (2005). In Twilight (2008) Jacob Black is a minor part and we did not single him out. He nearly lost the part for the sequel, since the character was due to grow into a werewolf, and he kept it by changing his body and auditioning again. "I was 140 pounds and I had to put on 35 pounds of muscle to keep my role," he has said. He played Jacob through to The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 (2012), and for those years he was a teen idol, which is a job but not a part.

The trouble is that the body was the performance, and a body cannot do dialogue. Rosenberg writes Jacob in New Moon as patient, then angry, then patient again, and the film is more interested in his chest than in his head. The leads that followed asked for the same thing. Abduction (2011), directed by John Singleton, put him at the front of a thriller, and the verdict was that he could run and fight and not much else; Tracers (2015) trained him in parkour and was taken as more of the same with the shirt off. The comedies, The Ridiculous 6 (2015) among them, were received as flat. Television has been kinder: Cuckoo (2014-2018), and Scream Queens (2016), where his comic timing was noticed for the first time.

We laughed at the shirt in New Moon, and we were not sure the film was laughing with us, and on reflection the discomfort was on his behalf. Lautner is visibly working, in every sense, and the film has decided the work is all it needs from him. He has since made Home Team (2022) and is developing a series called Taylor Lautner: Werewolf Hunter, so he has at least worked out the joke. Whether he can play anything other than the joke, nobody has yet given him the chance to show us.