With less than a week to go before The Twilight Saga: Eclipse finally lands in theaters, it's now time for the marketing machine to pull out all the stops. And when I say all the stops, I mean they're actually trying to find a way to now convince fans that Robert Pattinson is in some way related to the real-life Dracula. In other words, Pattinson and his vampire character Edward are one in the same!
Whoa, wait – back up. What? Seriously? Yes, seriously. According to this Reuters story, the genealogy web site Ancestry.com claims Robert Pattinson is distantly related to Vlad III Dracula – the cruel 15th century ruler who inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula. Naturally it's very convenient timing on the part of Ancestry.com (not to mention a nice piece of marketing for the site itself), and their findings are definitely a little suspect.
Case in point: they say Pattinson is "likely" related through the Royal family, who he's "probably" related to through the Pickerling family who lived in England during the early 1500s. So yeah, when you throw the word "probably" in there, it seems like these folks are making a few leaps to get to Dracula himself. Needless to say, even if Pattinson were somehow related to Vlad, he's still a regular dude and not a vampire. Then again, after making a total of 5 Twilight films, he may think twice about working some blood into his everyday diet.
