LOS ANGELES – As The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 smashes records worldwide, the spotlight is on its pint-size half-human, half-vampire breakout star, Mackenzie Foy.
Foy, 12, agrees “it’s a little weird” how much she looks like her on-screen parents Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart.“Kristen’s eyes are green just like mine. And then Rob is kind of goofy. I’m kind of goofy like Rob,” she says, curling up today at the Ritz-Carlton in skinny jeans, a plaid shirt and slim navy high-top Converse sneakers.
Ever-vocal Twihards agree, and have assembled Twitter handles like @NessieMackenzie, @MackenzieFarmy and @MissKenzieFoy in her honor. “I’ve noticed that Mackenzie is a HUGE fan of Converse, just like Kristen,” tweeted fan @MissKenzieFoy.
In the new film, Foy’s role is expanded from her brief turn in Part 1, playing a young half-bloodsucker who grows rapidly. “One hour she’ll be an infant and the next she’ll be a toddler,” says Foy, whose face was transposed onto younger body doubles through CGI.
Foy had fun on set, from riding a furry mechanical bull (meant to be Jacob the werewolf) to keeping a swear jar for her older stars and donating the proceeds to St. Jude’s hospital. “Some of them paid me in advance,” she said, laughing. Although Stewart, “did say a couple bad words, I’m not gonna lie,” Foy describes Stewart, who guards her character ferociously in the film, as a ” best friend-sister-mom all combined.”
Plus, she got some cool downtime with the cast. “I heard Kristen play her trumpet,” she says, laughing. “Rob got her a trumpet and you could hear in the hotel.”
The chatty, friendly young actress recently saw a Starbucks fall pin-drop quiet when she walked in, but sweetly shrugs off all the attention she’s receiving. Her friends treat her normally, she says, and the home-schooled actress is still having fun off-screen painting, kicking butt as a junior black belt in tae kwon do, and baking her own birthday cakes, a tradition she loves.
Born and raised just outside of Los Angeles, Foy’s parents, a homemaker and truck driver, had no connections to the entertainment industry. Spotted at a dance recital at age 3, Foy soon began booking print jobs modeling, followed by commercials and TV shows. Breaking Dawn — Part 1 was her first film.
As a parting gift, Foy got to take her character’s dragonfly pin with her. “It’s pretty special,” she says. (She left a few behind, too. Foy estimates she lost five baby teeth over the course of the two-year production.)
Next projects including horror flick The Conjuring opposite Vera Farmiga. But could there could be more to the story of Jacob and Renesmee (as author Stephenie Meyer has teased)? “I think it’d be fun to come back to Renesmee and see what her life is beyond what Part 2 ends with,” says Foy. “I think it would just be cool to see where her life takes her.”
Thinking of Rob 