Twilight: Midnight Sun Netflix Series Confirms Original Cast Won't Return

While the show’s current status remains in an unknown state, multiple original Twilight Saga actors confirm they won’t be returning for Netflix’s Midnight Sun. The series is set to serve as an adaptation of Stephanie Meyer’s 2020 novel of the same name, which takes an alternate path to the original Twilight book and retells its events through the lens of Edward Cullen.

After talks began swirling in early 2023 that Lionsgate were looking to revive the franchise in some fashion, it was officially announced that Midnight Sun had been given a straight-to-series order at Netflix in September 2024, with Tell Me Lies alum Sinead Daly serving as writer and executive producer on the animated adaptation. In the year since, no official updates have come out about the show’s progress, while various franchise cast members have shared their opinions on the new Twilight incarnation.

Now, during the ScreenRant-hosted Q&A panel for Twilight moderated by Joe Deckelmeier at Motor City Comic Con, stars Ashley Greene, Peter Facinelli, Kellan Lutz and Jackson Rathbone have addressed Midnight Sun‘s development. Before properly diving into their thoughts on the series, Greene was quick to confirm “we’re not” coming back as Cullen family members Carlisle, Jasper, Alice and Emmett, with Facinelli going on to chuckle as he shared the group did ask “Can we do it?“, only for the streamer’s creative team to say no:

Peter Facinelli: Well, here’s the truth, I’m bummed, because I love that character so much, so I hate the idea of having someone else play it. But also, that movie, to me, like so many people, if you watch that movie, it takes you back to a time. There’s a nostalgia to it. It takes you back to a time when you were watching it with your mom, or watching it with your friends, when you were watching it in the movie theaters. I feel like there’s a part of growing up that people experience over the last 25 years, 20 years, you know, with these movies.

With that feeling of nostalgia essentially backing Netflix’s support for the new Twilight series, Facinelli went on to opine that the show “doesn’t have the same connection to the older movies that everybody loves” without he and the group, along with the rest of the movies’ cast, reprising their roles. He did, however, still offer them a vote of support, expressing that he’s “sure it’ll be great in its own right“, albeit because it’ll be different, he doesn’t “know what advice I could offer them to get it right“.

Rathbone went on to reveal the “funny” manner in which he and his co-stars learned about the show’s existence, with fans initially telling them of the animated Midnight Sun‘s development, to which they shrugged it off as, “No, there’s not“. Instead, they went on to discover while attending a convention and interacting with an actress — who he said, “I’m not gonna say” their name — revealed that they auditioned for the show, leaving him flabbergasted and asking to see the script sides she was given.

Rathbone acknowledged that “it’s an inevitability that they’re gonna reboot“, and that he and his co-stars “are not silly“. However, from there, he contacted his agent to see about the possibility of asking to come back as his Twilight character, then turning to Facinelli, Greene and Lutz to come up with a plan for how best to offer their voices to the show:

Jackson Rathbone: We were like, “Hey, it would be kind of cool, we’re still pretty fresh out of it. It’s not that far. Our voices haven’t changed that much. Let’s go ahead and let them know, as a group, collectively, we’d love to come back and do it the right way.” No one asked for a lot of money, trust me. [Laughs] We’re always coming back because we love y’all, man, we wanted to do it for the fans. We love our characters. And they very nicely said, “No.” We couldn’t even get an audition for it, which is funny.

Lutz bounced off of Rathbone’s note about their voices to point out Midnight Sun is going to be an animated series, therefore eliminating any potential concerns of the actors having aged out of their roles. Greene concurred as she exclaimed, “We still sound so young!“, though she did still speak for the group in expressing that “whoever takes on the role, we wish them the best” and that the material gives them “something that resonates in something that they love“.

Even still, she did denote her concern about it being “so hard” to recapture the success of the original movies, pointing out how “people try and replicate what Twilight did all the time, and a lot of times it fails“. Describing there being “some secret sauce” that the team behind the original films found in adapting Meyer’s novels, Greene did share a curiosity as to whether “they’re able to translate that into an animation or not“.

As for Facinelli, he found himself equating the experience to Christmas 2024, in which he downloaded an animated version of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas to show his three-year-old son, as he “wanted to experience” his child’s wonder the same way he had growing up with the film. However, what he came to find was “it was the wrong one” when starting the film, having instead downloaded the Benedict Cumberbatch-led 2018 version, clarifying he has no qualms with the two-time Oscar nominee, but more so just “isn’t the version that I grew up with“:

Peter Facinelli: It felt like nails on chalkboard to me. And I’m sure my son loved it. He’s three, and will love everything. But to me, I grew up with this thing, and I wanted to have that, because it’s a comfort to me, so that’s how I kind of equate it. But I’m sure other people will find this, if there’s a new thing, and they’ll love the new thing, so it’ll just be different.

The former Cullen family actors aren’t the only ones who have confirmed they won’t be back for the upcoming Midnight Sun series. Both Chaske Spencer and Gil Birmingham, who played La Push Alpha Sam and Quileute tribe elder Billy Black in the original Twilight movies, were similarly surprised to learn through interviews and fan interactions of the show’s existence, with the former confirming he won’t be back, while the latter didn’t explicitly answer one way or the other.

To the group’s point, their voices haven’t necessarily changed so dramatically to the point of requiring a recast. Netflix has already found success with bringing back an entire cast of actors into an animated retelling of a prior live-action movie with Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, the anime twist on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel and Edgar Wright’s film of the same name. Even with there being 13 years between the film and series, the entire cast was still invited back.

However, more than just the thought of their voices having potentially aged, the more likely reason why Midnight Sun is going in a new direction with its cast is for the financial reasons of bringing everyone back. Both Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson have exploded in popularity in the years since Twilight that their returns would require a good paycheck, let alone the rest of the cast. Combined with paying the animation studio, and laying the groundwork for future seasons, Netflix is likely aiming for their Twilight reboot to be a proper slate cleaning.