Laurent was one of the Twilight saga's most compelling villains, but streamlining the original movie's story meant cutting the character's role down.
The original Twilight featured an interesting villain in the form of Laurent, but the movie adaptation cut a lot of the character’s most compelling elements for story purposes. Released in 2008, Twilight was the first in a series of blockbuster paranormal romance movies adapted from the best-selling book saga by Stephenie Meyers. Although the movies did not fare all that well with critics, they did spectacularly at the box office thanks to the franchise’s massive fanbase.
However, some of the Twilight movies did receive stronger reviews than others, with 2010’s Eclipse and the original Twilight being well-received critically. The presence of strong villains helped these two franchise outings feel more fleshed-out and urgent than the romance-dominated New Moon and Breaking Dawn, resulting in their superior reception. However, the original Twilight still cut one of the most interesting book villains to streamline the story, despite their compelling character.
Laurent, the third member of James’ villainous Twilight coven, has a reduced role in the movie despite the character having a fascinating, centuries-long backstory. The reason for Laurent’s truncated role was the director’s decision to focus on James over his lackey, but the call means that viewers never get to see any of the backstory that led Laurent to ally with his coven in the first place. In fairness to Cam Gigandet’s James, he is one of the more effective villains in the franchise. However, Laurent’s story still deserved a chance to shine, as a look over his role in the franchise’s mythos proves.
Like many minor characters in the Twilight universe, Laurent has a surprisingly complex and involved backstory. However, it is worth noting that, unlike the more heroic Cullens, Laurent’s life is not defined by struggle and hardship even after he becomes a vampire. Born a French aristocrat, Laurent grew up in wealthy environs but was perpetually bored by his comfortable lifestyle. He was eventually seduced into becoming a vampire by a powerful visiting lord, although the character’s backstory notes that he begged to become a bloodsucker and gain immortality. Unlike most of the saga’s vampires, Laurent actively decided to become a vampire, something he has in common with fellow Twilight villain Victoria (although her dark backstory makes the choice easier to empathize with).
From then on, Laurent abandoned his maker to journey across Europe as an immortal, and this adventure attached him to one of the Twilight saga’s most pivotal figures. Laurent was part of the defeated Romanian coven for a while, but was left behind by them as one of their members could sense his desire to gain power and knew Laurent would not be above betraying them. Laurent eventually crossed paths with James and Victoria after being unceremoniously exiled by the pre-Volturi royalty of the series, though not before he attempted to join the Volturi themselves. The Volturi, ironically, assumed he was still loyal to the Romanian Coven and rejected him in case he was a spy for their former foes.
In the Twilight movies Laurent barely features, but to be fair to the filmmakers, this is not a typical case of the series cutting out a compelling backstory solely so that the creators can save on screen time. Instead, Laurent’s more minor role was cut down so that the first film can establish James as the movie’s primary threat and simultaneously reinforces his closeness with Victoria. The third movie in the series, the underrated Eclipse, made it clear that as James’ mate Victoria was so attached to him she was still willing to kill the Cullens over his death, and the Twilight movies would have lost this great villain by making her no more important to James than his travel companion Laurent. This left little room for Laurent, though, who was already something of a middle man in their coven in the novel continuity and is not very close with either member in the films.
While the Twilight adaptations barely feature Laurent, they do still manage to alter a lot about the character from his portrayal in the book series. In the novel, Laurent is described as “pale, with olive skin” whereas in the movie adaptation he is played by a Black actor. This was one of the few instances where Stephenie Meyers allowed the filmmakers to cast as she saw fit, and the author received some criticism for only allowing a villainous character to be played by a person of color. Original Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke pushed for more diverse casting and did manage to cast actors of various races and ethnicities as Bella’s friends, but Laurent remains one of few Black characters in the movie series, alongside the lawyer J. Jenks and a handful of vampires recruited from across the world to help the Cullens in the final film’s big battle.
Also known for The Blacklist and Gone Baby Gone, actor Edi Gathegi is a compelling screen presence as Laurent and manages to make the character more believably affable than the blatantly villainous James and Victoria. This counterbalances the more cartoonish and over-the-top elements of the original movie’s villains and ensures that Laurent is not lost in the mix, but the fact that the actor plays the character as a sharp, keen-eyed observer ready to switch allegiances in the instance of a power struggle proves that Laurent deserved a larger role. Last seen in the weakest Twilight outing New Moon, the fate of Laurent is left unknown as his character never appears after the second franchise outing. This is in keeping with his novel counterpart, who is similarly never seen again after the events of New Moon. The ambiguous fate of Laurent is one of few elements of the character that the movies do justice to, but it hardly makes up for the adaptations wasting a threatening villain with a dark backstory. He may only be one of many villains in the series, but Twilight’s Laurent remains easily the most underused character in the movie adaptations thanks to his missing backstory.
