Not very long ago, Taylor Lautner was getting paid by the ab, each commanding upwards of $1 million. At least, that’s how legendary Hollywood journalist Nicki Finke put it when she reported in January 2010 that Lautner would be getting paid $7.5 million for Northern Lights, a planned extreme-flying flick. Just like that, less than two months after Lautner’s beefed-up physique hit the screen in The Twilight Saga: New Moon and ignited a fierce Team Jacob versus Team Edward rivalry within the franchise’s fandom, the 17-year-old was Hollywood’s highest-paid teen actor.
“Meteoric” wouldn’t even begin to describe Lautner’s rise. There wasn’t a word for it, really. A few months after the announcement, The Wrap put it into this perspective: Lautner’s salary “far outstrips the sums commanded by fellow heartthrobs Zac Efron and Shia LaBeouf at similar points in their career.” According to the site’s reporting, LaBeouf received $1 million for Transformers and somewhere in the $5 to $6 million range for 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Efron, meanwhile, scored a reported $1 million for 17 Again and about $3 million for High School Musical 3: Senior Year. Lautner, who had previously appeared in the flop The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D and the first Twilight movie to considerably less fanfare, had gone from obscurity to A-list, practically overnight.
By 2011, Lautner was asking for $10 million for Goliath, a planned David and Goliath adaptation, according to Vulture. That movie was canceled, as was the superhero flick Stretch Armstrong, for which Lautner was supposed to receive $7.5 million. He dropped out of Northern Lights, too, but got somewhere in the ballpark of $5 million to $7.5 million for the John Singleton-directed Abduction, which was released in September 2011 and landed with a thud (it took in $82 million worldwide gross against a $35 million budget, and a thrashing from critics).
Informed people knew the Lautner fever was out of hand. In March 2010, a few months after the Northern Lights announcement, the Daily Beast ran a piece scrutinizing Lautner’s asking price called “Is He Sabotaging His Career?” Within, Kim Masters reported that: “A number of Hollywood insiders—agents, producers, executives—are skeptical about his long-term prospects; one producer says dismissively that Lautner appeals primarily to ‘little girls and gay men.’ And a leading agent says Lautner reminds him of The Situation from Jersey Shore (‘It’s all his abs’) or ‘that blond dude from Blue Lagoon,’ a heartthrob movie from 1980.” Vulture quoted a skeptical unnamed senior production executive at a major studio: “William Morris has done a brilliant job of convincing Hollywood that he’s the next big movie star.” In a June 2010 GQ profile, writer Mickey Rapkin put it bluntly: “Taylor Lautner is being offered action-star tentpole money. But he hasn’t actually been in an action film yet.”
The skepticism hardly reads as prophecy in 2020, now that Lautner’s cultural clout has diminished considerably. In the past five years, he’s accumulated just five acting credits, the most recent being his 2014-2018 stint in the British TV series Cuckoo. His most recent job in the States occurred in 2016 as part of the ensemble of Ryan Murphy’s short-lived Fox series Scream Queens. Lautner’s trajectory from being thrust into the stratosphere to barely heard from at all is so extreme that it reads less like the accelerated Hollywood cycle that it is and more an expression of pure physics. What goes up must come down. Hard.
So, what happened? That’s the question The Hollywood Reporter asked in 2015 in a short item titled “The New A-List: What Went Wrong With Taylor Lautner’s Career.” The trade’s explanation was as follows:
So what happened? Insiders point to 2011’s Abduction, which was critically panned (it earned $82 million worldwide). After that, Universal put Stretch Armstrong into turnaround, and the leading-man offers dried up. “His first movie just wasn’t very good, and it didn’t justify what he was asking for at the time,” says one producer. He since has focused on smaller roles, recently wrapping the indie thriller Run the Tide and the second season of the BBC comedy series Cuckoo, allowing him to flex the muscles he’ll use in Adam Sandler’s Netflix film The Ridiculous Six.
Producer Joe Roth, who was set to produce another abandoned Lautner project that was at one point set to yield the heartthrob millions, Max Steel, told the Beast he felt “jerked around” by Lautner’s whims. “I think he’s getting bad advice,” said Roth. Not helping matters was Lautner’s being dropped by publicist Robin Baum (who also repped longstanding members of the Hollywood elite like Johnny Depp and Daniel Craig) just three months after signing him in 2011. In her write-up of that news for The Hollywood Reporter, Merle Ginsberg added: “Word is, his father, Daniel Lautner, isn’t the easiest guy to work with.”
And even if he envisioned superstardom and all that came with it, surely living it was way different than he could have imagined.
Lautner had been hurtled into Hollywood by his martial arts coach Michael Chaturantabut (aka Mike Chat, who’s best known for playing the Blue Ranger in the TV series Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue). When Chaturantabut offered to hook Lautner up with his connections, Lautner and his family initially demurred. In 2009, Lautner recalled to Rolling Stone: “We were like, ‘No, that’s not for us.’ I was like, ‘I’m sticking to my sports.’ But for some reason, this guy believed in me. He said he’d put us up at his house for a month. And he’d help get me on auditions.” But thanks to Chaturantabut’s persistence as well as the cheap flights available to Lautner’s family as a result of his father’s job as a Midwest Airlines pilot, he started to fly out to Los Angeles from Michigan.
During his heyday, Lautner looked enthusiastic (he packed on a reported 30 lbs. between Twilight and New Moon) and came off as affable, prompting one unnamed producer to tell Rolling Stone: “You look at Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, and they look miserable about their success. Taylor is like a kid in a candy store. He’s so happy and excited.” But looking beyond his aw-shucks grin and diligently sculpted bod, it was clear that the reluctant rookie transformed almost immediately into a disillusioned superstar. Quote after quote of Lautner’s reveals a carefully balanced acknowledgment of the pitfalls of being attached to a cultural phenomenon (and arguably one in his own right). “There’s some things you just have to live with. Like 12 cars camping outside your house, and when you wake up in the morning, they’re going to follow you wherever you go,” he told GQ. In an interview shot in Manila, he noted that, “I was doing interviews at 10 years old and that’s just not normal.” Hard to argue with that.
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