Taylor Lautner packed on 30 pounds of muscle for his return role as Jacob Black in The Twilight Saga: New Moon. (Fred Prouser/REUTERS)

LOS ANGELES — Twilight’s werewolf needs to beware of cougars.

Sometimes even during interviews.

“Oh boy,” a flustered Taylor Lautner responds when informed by one female journalist of a website that’s predatorily counting down to his 18th birthday. “No, that’s very interesting. I wasn’t aware of this countdown.”

Not that he should be. After all, this sort of adoration is relatively new for the 17-year-old Lautner, who was overshadowed in last year’s Twilight by Robert Pattinson’s star-making turn as Edward Cullen, a brooding bloodsucker with bedhead.

Lautner made such an innocuous impression as shape-shifter Jacob Black, he was almost replaced. Director Chris Weitz (The Golden Compass) confirms recasting Jacob was “a possibility. But I was always convinced that he was going to be able to do it.”

At issue was both the fact Lautner didn’t get much to do in Twilight — as well as his physique. “He’s described as being 6-(foot-)5 in the second book,” Weitz says. “But I liked the sweetness of this character in the first movie, and I knew that it was easier to take an actor in the direction of anger and rage than it was to find someone who is kind of a hunk ... and somehow turn him into that very sweet-natured persona.”

Remembers Kristen Stewart, who stars as Jacob’s childhood friend and prospective girlfriend, Bella Swan: “I think that controversy has probably been, like, made bigger than it was. We needed to be sure that whoever played Jacob was going to be Jacob in New Moon. He’s such a different person. He becomes a man. It’s not just a physical transformation. He really becomes an adult. I mean, I always knew that Taylor could do that, but we just needed to make sure.”

And Lautner didn’t disappoint. He immediately hit the gym and began a strict regimen of diet and exercise.

“The most important thing was the eating side,” Lautner says. “Everybody thinks it was the actual getting in the gym. That was easy — I was motivated. But the eating was pretty hard. It was just eating a lot. I found out that I had to consume at least 3,200 calories a day just to maintain. And I’m not trying to maintain, I’m trying to gain.”

Eating every two hours — “I would literally have to carry a little baggie of beef patties, raw almonds, sweet potatoes,” he says. Ultimately, he gained 30 pounds of muscle, convincing the filmmakers he could believably hold his own against Pattinson.

Says Stewart of Lautner: “He’s so confident, and the nicest guy that I’ve ever met. I know that I’m using this grammatically incorrect, but he’s the funnest guy I’ve ever hung out with. So he’s great. I’m so proud of him.”

The downside? Gratuitous shirtlessness, as Jacob routinely wears only a pair of tattered shorts.

In one scene, when Bella is injured, he automatically rips off his shirt to help stop the bleeding. It’s a moment that has generated plenty of laughter from moviegoers — Lautner included. “I start laughing so hard every time I see that scene. ‘You’re bleeding? OK, let me fix it.’ It’s so embarrassing.”

Not laughing — but swooning — are the legions of teenage girls (and older women) sometimes seen wearing dueling Team Edward and Team Jacob T-shirts.

“I don’t think there’s a way to ever get used to it,” Lautner says of all the attention. “It’s not normal to drive down the street and see your face up there. But it’s Twilight. It comes with the job.”

Wolf pack out to slay ‘leather and feather’ stereotype

Dances with werewolves? Not quite. And for that, the Native American actors who play the “wolf pack” in The Twilight Saga: New Moon were grateful.

“I think it’s time for us to kind of rewrite what Hollywood’s take on Native Americans was — which was long-hair blowing, noble kind of people,” Alex Meraz says.

Or as his co-star, Chaske Spencer, describes it, “Leather and feather.”

In the sequel, Meraz, Spencer, Bronson Pelletier and Kiowa Gordon play members of the Quileute tribe, capable of transforming into powerful, vampire-slaying wolves. They’re also in Eclipse, the third movie that recently wrapped in Vancouver and hits theatres next summer.

All four actors believe the Twilight films represent a chance to counterbalance how Hollywood usually portrays Native Americans.

“I know a lot of Natives who are lawyers and doctors who don’t always wear their hair in braids,” Spencer says. “I think that’s a misconception. Not all of us are like that.”

Says Meraz, “Hollywood thought Adam Beach was the only Native American.”

Spencer laughs. “I lost out on a lot of roles to that guy.”