Gator-Aid: The Making of Robert Pattinson’s Vanity Fair Cover Shot

With assistance from a careful team of alligator handlers, Robert Pattinson’s April cover photo was taken by Annie Leibovitz at an alligator ranch and hatchery in Louisiana. One of about 40 such ranches in the state, it works to protect and propagate the once-endangered American alligator by harvesting, incubating, and hatching the eggs of wild alligators, and by promoting the preservation of the Louisiana wetlands.

Shortly after Pattinson’s shoot, he found himself in a potentially more frightening situation: cornered by a crowd of screaming girls. (The daughters of a ranch staffer had assembled an excited group of comrades to ask him for a photograph.) The heartthrob obliged his fans and left a warm impression on the folks at the farm as well. The ranch’s founder and owner, John Price, in a phone interview a week after the shoot, remembered Pattinson as “quite the gentleman.”

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Carrie