Today's Evil Beet Gossip

How Twilight Ruined Christmas

A photo of Kate Beckinsale

Look, you guys, it’s Kate Beckinsale! We haven’t even mentioned Kate Beckinsale in over two years, and the last time we ran an actual story about her was back in 2009, when she left her dog in her car, and that’s a mighty long time in these parts.

So what has Kate been up to all this time? Probably just like filming Underworld movies back to back that no one wants to see, right? Nah, she’s just reading to her kid all the time is all.

From Us Weekly:

Kate Beckinsale is passionate about reading, but says her daughter’s passion for The Twilight Saga nearly “ruined” their family’s Christmas!

During National Reading Month in March, the Total Recall star, 38, teamed up with “The Nestle Share the Joy Reading Program” to promote the importance of children’s literacy.

Beckinsale told Us Weekly, “One of the things I like about the Nestle program is that it is very good with providing reading materials to children who are from low income families and don’t have access in their homes… [to] age appropriate reading material.”

The actress has a 13-year-old daughter, Lily, with her ex Michael Sheen, 43. The couple separated in 2003 after eight years and Beckinsale married Len Wiseman, 38, in 2004.

“I’ve been very obsessed with reading since I was tiny,” she shared. “My mum was a big reader and very much imposed reading on me and I’m the same with my daughter, who’s a huge reader.”

Recalled Beckinsale, “She read Twilight and was completely obsessed with them. It actually almost ruined Christmas one year because all she wanted to do was be a vampire and she didn’t want anything on her Christmas list.”

The actress read to her daughter “every night for 11 something years” until it became “a little less appropriate” as Lily grew up.

“I did read the entire Harry Potter, which, you know they got pretty long in the end,” she explained to Us Weekly. “We did all that and that was a really fun thing for us.”

Let’s get one thing straight: it is always completely appropriate to read to someone. Always. During college, my BFF read the entire Harry Potter series to a group of us, and it was absolutely wonderful. We would go to her room and be like “please, I have a midterm tomorrow and if I have to study this algebra bullshit* for one more second, I’m going to go crazy, so can we read the next chapter of Order of the Phoenix now?” And it was always so soothing.

But man, is it kind of disturbing to anyone else that her daughter was so into Twilight that she wanted to be a vampire for Christmas?

*Listen, my college algebra class was a joke. It took me four hours to complete the final, and that was with multiple instances of going to her desk and asking her for help. I’d be like “I’m having trouble with this question,” and she’d be all “you just have to use the Pythagorean theorem,” and I’d be like “what?” She said “that’s middle school geometry,” and I was just like “whatever.” I made a B in the class, but that was because about three and half hours into the final, two hours after everyone else in the class was done, she asked me what my major was, probably because she couldn’t believe I was having so much trouble. I told her I was a theatre major, and she said “ohhh.” She said “theatre would be really hard for me,” and I said “probably like algebra is really hard for me.” And that’s my algebra story.

5 CommentsLeave a comment

  • My husband reads to me every night as we settle into sleep. I love it; it IS soothing (even the boring articles in Consumer Reports).

    I studied English/Creative Writing at undergrad, and had a similar experience in a math class. I kept trying to “interpret” the math problems (it wasn’t even Algebra though, but rather “College Math”) and my instructor was like, “What is your major? This is math. You can’t “interpret” this; just do the problem.”

  • I used to want to be a vampire when I was kid after reading the Vampire Chronicles. When Twilight came out, I was all “Yay, more vampires!” But then I read it and all I could think of was how much I wanted to punch everyone who liked it in the throat.

    I’m taking elementary algebra right now in college and I don’t know how the hell I’m ever gonna remember how to do everything come finals. There’s just too much. And I still have to take intermediate algebra.

  • Love the algebra story.

    I can see wanting to be a vampire. I started wanting to be one in second or third grade, when I first read about them. They sounded lovely, and they still do. But that was over a decade before Twilight happened–also known as the worst PR disaster for vampires, ever.

    Twilight ruins more than just Christmas.

  • Ha. My physics teacher in secondary school basically finished the exam for me (the subject was compulsory). He told me “you’re exceptionally bright and you’ll go places… just not in science. There you go”.

    • Wow, I’m jealous. Physics was the only course in high school that I just could not get a handle on, and the teacher was a real douchebag who would call you stupid for asking questions and refused to give extra help, so I ended up messing up my GPA. To make things worse, that douchebag teacher and I shared a last name (my maiden name), so I got teased a lot for being either related or, worse, married to him. =(