Werewolf worlds collided last Wednesday when he guest starred as Emma Myers in The Squeeze. Taylor Lautner co-hosts a podcast with his wife, who is also called Taylor or Ty for short. Myers most recently had her breakout role as Enid Sinclair in Netflix’s Wednesday. Lautner is, of course, best known for his role as Jacob Black in The twilightt, a franchise that was inevitable about two decades ago. Their experience in acting and The Wolf gave them a lot to talk about.
They both started acting when they were very young. Myers did a lot of theater and commercial work growing up but had only a few film and television roles due to the lack of people being employed from Orlando, her hometown. She’d book one thing and then go months without testing another, an experience Lautner knows all too well. Finally, when Myers was 12, she took a break from acting, unsure if she would return to it.
“So I put all my energy into dancing, and I’ve been a dancer for a while. And then when I turned 16, I moved to Atlanta, and I thought, OK, people are hiring out of Atlanta, maybe they’ll also give it another try because it’s still a huge passion of mine. But yeah, As a kid, unless I was doing some local business or print or something, it wasn’t like that; I didn’t see it as a job because it wasn’t enough to, you know, go on.”
Then the test came to Wednesday, which was a long process. He auditioned for Enid in February 2021. After that, it was two months before she heard anything. I got a callback via Zoom, followed by another two months without hearing anything. Then she read her chemistry with actress Jenna Ortega on Wednesday, which Meyers initially thought bombed her.
“She did. The thing I didn’t realize about how Jenna plays Wednesday on our call is that she’s very, very, very slow with her words. Very slow. Very articulate, and she cut one of her lines, thinking maybe she’d forgotten the second half of her line or just ended. And I said, “Okay, okay, I’m not going to let the awkward silence continue.” So I jumped on it, but at the time, she went to say her line at the same time, and there was a little fumbling there. And I got off the call, and I said, “No, it’s not happening. I missed that. A week later, I booked it, but yeah, the process took four months.”
How did Enid Werewolf get over the edge on Wednesday?
After getting the role, Myers participated in “werewolf boot camp”, which Lautner found very amusing because he didn’t have to do anything like that for Jacob. “I did a little gymnastics and some figure skating, but mostly a dance background.” To quell a jealous Lautner, Myers added that she didn’t use any of that during filming.
“Well, COVID, in part. They didn’t want us mixed up with the stunt crew, and we were a month behind schedule, and it got to the point where it was easier to just let the stuntman do it. So, next season, then.”
When she learned she was going to be playing a werewolf, Lautner asked Myers if she should call “someone” who played the werewolf for advice. Or are you more than Teen Wolf Tyler Posey? Myers reassured him that she was “Twilight all the way.”
“Funny is, my cousin is obsessed with Twilight, and she’s been calling me ‘local Jacob’ for a long time after I booked on Wednesday, when I sent her a picture of us together, and she sent me a voice memo like, ‘What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?” (Lautner: “We’ll have to face it after this”) We’ll do it, we’ll do it. Yeah, it’ll flare up.”
As the final round of questions kicked off, Lautner pulled out a contract for “Emma Myers, that’s your name, FYI” to sign to allow twilight/Wednesday spin off. Before any fans got their hopes up, Lautner was clearly joking. Of course, Myers’ first reaction was to say, “Oh my God, I’m going to do it.”
