Peninsula Daily News news services
TOFINO, British Columbia — With tsunami warnings posted along the West Coast on Friday after the 8.9-magnitude earthquake in Japan, actors Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner and other cast members were forced to leave the Tofino beach area where they have been filming the next “Twilight” movie, “Breaking Dawn.”
Tofino contains a long stretch of open coast on the furthest westerly point of Vancouver Island and was seen in the earlier “The Twilight Saga: New Moon.”
The one-day departure of the actors did not go down without drama.
Tinsel Korey, 30, a Canadian actress who plays a Makah tribal member, Emily Young, in the movies, sent out a “tweet” on Twitter.com:
“They’re evacuating us 4 a tsumnani [sic] warning. If this . . . is my last my tweet. I love you. The end. Hugz.”
She later tweeted:
“If this is the moment. Then I’ve lived a good life. And I’m thankful 4 everything I’ve been given.”
Only small tsunami waves washed up on the beaches, the warning was called off, Korey’s melodramatic “tweets” were later deleted — and filming resumed on Saturday.
Though set mostly in the North Olympic Peninsula’s Forks-Port Angeles-LaPush areas, the “Twilight” movies are largely filmed in British Columbia.
The expansive beaches of Tofino are a stand-in for LaPush, the home of the Quileute tribe, in the popular teen love-vampire series.
In the “Twilight” books and movies, some members of the tribe are capable of shapeshifting into werewolves, the enemies of vampires.
“Breaking Dawn — Part I” and “Breaking Dawn — Part II,” the fourth and fifth “Twilight” movies and a two-part adaptation of “Breaking Dawn,” the fourth and final novel in the “Twilight” book series by Stephenie Meyer, is tentatively scheduled for release Nov. 18 and Nov. 16, 2012.
