It seemed as though everyone but Edi Gathegi knew he was destined to be an actor. Gathegi, who has appeared in films such as Gone Baby Gone, Crank, My Bloody Valentine and the immensely popular Twilight films, began his acting career in college, though the signs were there, even as a child, that he should be a performer.

Gathegi recalls sharing a bunk bed with his older brother when he was a kid. “I was on top and he was on the bottom, and I would always tell him a story to put him to sleep, so I would regale my tale of the day, my adventures with my friends or I’d tell jokes,” he says.

But his immediate family members were not the only ones who had recognized his talent. When Gathegi told his father about his decision to act, his father pulled out a school file with Gathegi’s progress report from when he was 4 years old. “It said ‘Edi is affable. He should be an actor when he grows up. He has stage presence. He has a wonderful energy,’” Gathegi recalls. “My dad shows this to me and says, ‘We’ve known this since you were 4 years old; we’ve just been waiting for you to claim it.’”

Claiming it, however, was a process. Gathegi’s plan was to follow in his father’s footsteps and attend law school after college. But when a knee injury during college basketball tryouts left him severely hurt, he looked for an outlet. “I was so depressed. I just wanted to take an easy class that would take my mind off it. So, I took an acting class, but it wasn’t easy! It was challenging in just the right way. It was exciting and fresh.”

Gathegi says he always had an imagination. To this day, he wakes up and creates a new character in the shower. The introductory college acting course encouraged him to use his active imagination, which triggered his life’s plan. “I thought ‘If I can do this for a career and enjoy myself and make money, then this is exactly the thing for me,’” he says. From there, he claimed theater as a major and continued on to NYU for a postgraduate education in acting. After a disappointing showcase in New York City to complete his NYU program (he did not get an agency meeting), he went to Los Angeles for the second showcase the school provided for its students.

“After New York I was hurt, but chose to process it in the right way because it’s all about the acting, it’s not about the fame,” Gathegi explains. “I go to LA to do the showcase and it’s quite different. I get a lot of attention, my first two meetings turn into auditions and I book both of them. I started my career in LA, so it was quick. Focusing on me not having a career allowed me to have a career.”

The career path has led to Gathegi’s latest role as the vampire Laurent in the Twilight saga, the newest being the recently released New Moon. Twilight, according to Gathegi, has become a “full-blown pop culture phenomenon.” This obsession with vampires has spread from the Twilight novels, to the Twilight movies, to television series such as HBO’s True Blood. But why?

Gathegi believes that part of the vampire intrigue is the same as the appeal of the superhero. “They have superhuman strength, superhuman speed, supernatural gifts. Vampires are a different type of superhero. I think there’s an allure in the sense of sex appeal and all that strength and power,” he says. “There’s something interesting with vampires being on the outside, and how people identify with that.”

Gathegi had an inkling, pre-production of Twilight, that this was going to be big. He recalls an initial dinner with most of the cast, producers and directors, where he made a toast. “I toasted to being on the ground floor of something huge,” Gathegi says. But the rest of the dinner crowd was not as sure, it seemed, and gave him a perplexed collective stare, which caused Gathegi to question his feelings. “Who the hell was I to think that? I didn’t know what was going to happen with this,” he says.

Then came the comic book and popular arts convention, Comic-Con, which was the moment the Twilight group, as an entire production, first understood how big the movies were going to be. “There were 6,000 people camping out waiting to see us, screaming at the loudest decibel levels,” Gathegi recalls. “There was solid evidence that this was going to be big.”

The character of Laurent is typically pegged with the reputation of bad guy. But Gathegi sees the role differently. As he interprets it, Laurent is just a vampire doing what he needs to do in order to survive.

    “It’s really just about given circumstances. He’s a traditional vampire; he eats humans to survive. That doesn’t make him bad; that’s just his nature. [Laurent is] extremely fascinated with the idea that there are vampires who have trained themselves to just eat vampires, therefore becoming vegetarians. The fact that he’s intrigued by that makes him a more compassionate vampire. He’s curious about this vegetarianism. He lives forever, he’s bored as hell, he just wants to find something fun to do and not be a jerk all the time,” Gathegi says with a laugh.

    With such serious movie projects on his résumé thus far, Gathegi would like to start doing comedies, as well as roles “closer to the top of the call sheet,” he says. He also hopes to be able to play historical figures, such as Jamie Foxx did in Ray. But he won’t take a role simply for the sake of a job. For Gathegi, acting is all about his love of the craft and that is where his career will take him. “I don’t want to work just to work,” he says. “I want to work on things I’m passionate about.”

 Wardrobe Stylist - Toni Ferrara
Groomer - Lauren Kaye Cohen

 Vampire’s First Bite Martini

6 ounces Blavod black vodka
1/4 cup crushed red pepper flakes (optional)
4 cans (6 ounces each) Sacramento tomato juice or 8 medium-sized tomatoes, pureed
4 ounces olive juice
8 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
Worcestershire sauce, to taste
Tabasco hot sauce, to taste
Horseradish, to taste
Black pepper, to taste
Salt, to taste
4 pickled cherry tomatoes
8 olives

Optional : Create pepper-infused vodka by mixing 12 ounces vodka with red pepper flakes; allow at least 24 hours for the flavor to infuse. (The longer you allow it to marinate, the more of a bite it will have.)
Pickle your own cherry tomatoes with pickling juice, allowing to marinate for at least 3 days, or purchase them at your local market. 
Combine tomato  juice with olive juice, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, horseradish, black pepper and salt. Use a cheesecloth sieve to separate tomato mixture from pulp.  Let chill for 10-15 minutes.
In a shaker, combine spiked bloody Mary juice with 6 ounces of pepper-infused vodka  or the plain Blavod vodka and a cupful of crushed ice. Shake and strain into a chilled martini glass. 
Garnish with a wooden skewer of olives and pickled cherry tomatoes (alternating).

Serves 4