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How close was your daughter's interpretation of Aro to how you ended up playing him?
Michael Sheen: "Completely different. I said, 'What does he look like?' She said, 'He’s bald.' I think she was mixing it up with Nosferatu, the old vampire, you know? I said that to her, 'Do you remember you said that you thought he was bald and all this stuff?' And she said, 'Yes.' And I said, 'Were you mixing it up with something else?'"

"But it shows that people, and this is the beauty of books for a start, that your imagination creates your own version of these characters. And so when a film comes along and you're kind of going, 'No, it looks like this,' then that's a very delicate thing to get right or to find a way to meet everyone’s imaginary requirements of the character. So I was very aware of that because of my own daughter. I said, 'Sorry, I'm not bald. I've got long hair.'"

How collaborative was director Chris Weitz in actually getting the character down?

Michael Sheen: "Chris kind of left me to it, really. I mean when we were talking, working out the look of the character, he wanted to be as true to Stephenie [Meyer’s] vision of the characters as much as possible. So when we were working on the look, there would be pictures taken. Stephenie would get to look at them and it would be a kind of a group thing, a very collaborative thing, about coming to what the final look is. And that was good because they know far more about it than I do."

"I had my own input into it and what I felt was right and what worked with my face and everything. But I was very glad that Chris and Stephenie were involved in that as well. But then in terms of interpreting the character, they kind of left me to it, really. I would have loved to have talked to Stephenie loads about it, but I just kept rereading a few of the chapters in the book - especially the opening chapter where she describes Aro - just looking for anything that would help give me a clue. And then I was just left to my own devices."

And the voice?

Michael Sheen: "Well, the voice really came from Stephenie, what she wrote in the book. She writes this one line where she says, 'His voice was like feathers.' I liked this idea of this very soft kind of [voice]. Chris always said that Aro on the surface is very charming and very sort of serene and relaxed, but actually he's the most dangerous of all the vampires. So I liked that idea of on the surface this character who, and not that he's pretending to be something that he actually isn’t, but he really believes that he is a soft, warm, cuddly, grandmotherly-type sort of sentimental old fool, and a romantic, really. And he thinks of himself like that. He just happens to be a blood-sucking vampire who pulls peoples’ heads off. That's just what he is in the same way as a wolf is what a wolf is, a lion is what a lion is. We could still have a sentimental [attitude], you know? I loved that idea."

"The voice was very much based on that kind of soft thing. And then I started thinking about characters that I grew up with, watching them, the ones that really affected me when I was a kid and stayed with me. Characters like the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Blue Meanie in The Yellow Submarine, so there's bits of all that."

You've done the werewolf thing in the Underworld films and now you've played a vampire. Have you figured out why audiences are still so into these mythological creatures?

Michael Sheen: "I think ultimately it's a mystery and that's why it stays around. If we knew why we liked them, then we’d be able to put them in a little box and put them to one side and they wouldn't have such a hold on us. So there's ultimately something kind of mysterious about it. But I think it sort of touches on something deep down in us all, something kind of primal, something that's kind of untamed and uncivilized. You know, we all live in this civilized society and we all pretend that we’re all polite and civilized creatures, and we're not. We're animals. You know, we have animal instincts and animals lusts and animal desires and animal needs, and we sort of keep those down. And so the idea, especially in the Twilight world where you've got these vampires who have these kinds of animalistic, incredibly powerful urges and yet have to keep them down, I think it’s very easy to connect with that just generally as a society because that's what we do."

"But, more specifically, I think for a young audience who are just starting to become adults really, and starting to feel adult feelings and emotions and have adult thoughts, that can be quite frightening to navigate your way through that. I think the idea of a group of people who have to deal with that stuff themselves is, obviously, something that they connect with."

"I think each generation reinterprets things like vampires and werewolves. They're symbols and that's why they stay around for so long because they can mean something different, slightly different to each generation. And obviously by the amount of vampire things and werewolf things that are around at the moment, you can see that it’s kind of regenerating itself for this generation."