The Twilight juggernaut might be reaching its epic climax but the gazillion dollar-grossing film franchise’s other sexy vampire, Kellan Lutz, isn’t about to slow the pace for anyone. And conquering Hollywood is just the start of this ripped Renaissance man’s ambitions…
Someone obviously missed a few classes at celebrity training school. Famous people are supposed to show up 10, 15, even 45 minutes late for a meeting of this sort, but Kellan Lutz is waiting around outside when I arrive 10 minutes early. His two hapless-looking dogs, Kola and Kevin (“I got Kola at the pound when I broke up with my first girlfriend, and Kevin we found on the street.”) are sniffing at their master’s ankles. Oh, and we’re at his house. The famous never let you come to their house.
Lutz, 26, gives the first impression not so much of a movie star or A-list model, even though he appears as the god Poseidon in the sabre-clanking 3-D epic Immortals, and on billboards as big as your apartment building for Calvin Klein’s X underwear line (he also plays a vampire in the moderately successful Twilight film franchise, the final installment of which opens in November).
Rather, at 6’1” and resplendently rippled, Lutz looks like a guy sent from some super-race of humanity to kick your arse. Well, mine specifically. He’s quite affable but his black sleeveless tank top fits so tightly against his sculpted torso, it’s a wonder the material holds. He’s wearing fingerless black lifting gloves. His black mesh shorts flex around thighs that bulge like rotisserie chickens. His calves, under black knee-high tube socks, are bowling pins stuffed into size-12 Nikes.
Celebrities do not typically email in advance, but Lutz had written to ask me to bring workout gear. This was rather amusing since (a) magazine writers are well known to be unsporty, bookish types and (b) it sounded like he was inviting me to actually work out with him.
“Maybe we should check out the beach,” he says, performing a kind of knees-up march-in-place move that one might do before, say, a run. The dogs start sniffing each other and Lutz looks antsy. “I get bored working out inside, so the beach has been my place lately,” he says. “I run, I swim, I play paddleball, basketball, do some mixed martial arts. I like mixing things up.” And clearly it’s working for him. He looks down at me. “You into fitness?”
It’s not that I’m not. It’s just that any mortal man in the presence of a towering powerhouse like Lutz can’t help but feel like a yellow-billed oxpecker on the back of a great hippo. Which is why I’m relieved when Kevin the chihuahua suddenly scampers off to bark at something inside. “That must be Dick,” Lutz says, following Kevin into the house. “Dick’s one of my room-mates.” Lutz isn’t dating anyone at the moment, but still. Room-mates? “I like being around people,” he explains, “so I posted an ad on Craigslist saying I was looking for new blood.” He looks to see if I get the joke. “Dick came by and we liked him, so, yeah, now he’s one of my boys.”
“My boys” is a term Lutz uses a lot, as in, “My boys all want to go to Vegas to watch the Super Bowl with me, so I say, ‘Great. I’ll provide the rooms and whatnot. All you have to do is buy a $400 plane ticket.’ That’s when my boys start moaning, ‘Oh, we have no money.’ But then I’ll catch them spending $200 a night getting drunk with a girl. What’s up with that?”
