Here's some weekend reading to dissect. 2 interviews were conducted during Cannes and the final one is a translation but reads well. Enjoy some ClassicRob!
The Sunday Times - From Beauty To Beast: The best thing about Robert Pattinson is how weird he is. If he weren’t acting, he’d be the one in the office grinning with half a mouth and going out of his way to avoid the water cooler. He’s friendly, but weird — with a laugh like Butt-head if he’d gone to a nice independent school in Barnes. We met in May at the Cannes film festival, once he’d finished his cigarette under a sky barely holding its rain. To call his clothes “grunge” would be a disservice to the thought that goes into grunge. It’s just messy: lumberjack shirt, T-shirt, trainers, white jeans. “I’m so hung-over,” he moans, as I turn the tape on. “I feel absolutely disgusting.”
The room is packed with soggy hacks. They sit in clusters, for 15 minutes of R-Patz, for a quote about Twilight to spread over the internet. The vampire saga is over, but remains undead. From 2008 to 2012, those five films, based on Stephenie Meyer's novels, made £2 billion worldwide and fostered a fan base still fervently in love with their leading man. To many, he will always be Edward, the immortal who cared and fell in love with Bella (Kristen Stewart). They added to the mystique by becoming an off-screen couple, too. Throw in his key role in Harry Potter and it’s unsurprising that the pallid hunk has spent much of his life in the headlines. It’s been an odd coming-of-age for the youngest of three, who grew up in a polite London suburb and, as I find out, doesn’t really like big films.
What he does like is his latest role, in The Rover, an indie thriller from the director David Michôd, who hasn’t even seen Twilight. This pleases Pattinson, who talks avidly about the film even though he went to a party last night and “forgot” he had to work. There are few more normal 28-year-old multimillionaires. We talk about a recent interview for Dior in which he spoke, foolishly, about French girls because, “I was being asked ‘What’s your favourite part of scent?’” He shakes his head at the inanity of the question. “I also told someone I use moisturiser, and then saw it written down — I’ve spent all this time trying to get credibility and there’s a fucking headline about moisturiser!’”
The thing is, he’s mortified. All he wants, and needs, now is credibility. He’s loaded: five Twilights and some fashion contracts have sorted that. So, over the past few years, since David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis in 2012, he has been seeking weird, dirty roles. He’s the only actor to have had sex in a limo — on screen — twice this decade. In The Rover, he defecates in a dusty shrub. I put a quote from Catherine Hardwicke, who shot the first Twilight, to him. “Rob’s obviously ridiculously photogenic, but he’s also so talented. I see him creating stylised, odd, wild characters.” He squirms at the first part, but loves the second.
“I’m picking things so strange, they can’t be judged in normal terms,” he says. His brain is creaking; his voice, soft and tired. “If anything’s relatable in a mass way, I don’t know if I can do it. That’s just not how I relate to anything. If there are certain character beats, I’m not going to be able to achieve them. So I like making it my own game. You can invent a new set of emotions that don’t even really make sense to you.”
In The Rover he plays Rey, a bloodied drifter in a future Australia, ravaged lawless by some unspecified crash. He may be a soldier and, as Pattinson puts it, is “handicapped”. The actor is excellent, bringing the baggage of his better-known work to a sombre, serious film — Sad Max, if you like — that pits him against Guy Pearce’s angry Eric. The pretty one sings along to a song that goes: “Don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful.” Rey’s teeth are awful: pyramid-sharp and crooked. They remind Pattinson of “the kids at school who didn’t brush their teeth” — the “weirdos”, he smirks. “Always the ones who played too many video games.”
This is what’s fun about Pattinson — or, at least, his hung-over version. There’s no filter. Most big shots would hold back from a slur about people who play video games, as most of them watch their movies, too. But he doesn’t. I suggest that the mentally and physically crooked Rey is his Miley Cyrus moment, a public ruining of something innocent. “It’s like doing Miley Cyrus,” he repeats, grunt-giggling, but I don’t think he ever thought of himself as pure. He certainly doesn’t care. He doesn’t even have a publicist. I could have asked who he’s dating, but any answer about that from a globetrotting young heart-throb in May, for a piece in August, felt hopeless. On the way out to Cannes, I read up on his love life. There were rumours about the model Imogen Kerr, and Katy Perry, and Katy Perry’s stylist.
I ask what he thinks he will be remembered for, how Google will autofill his name in the future. Stewart — his Twilight co-star, about whom he recently said, “Shit happens” — will always be there. So will Twilight. What else? “Gay?” he laughs. But it’s not really up to you, I add. Yours is an image controlled by manic fans, ones who retweet any news about any role hundreds of times a minute. “They’re very proactive,” he nods. “Good publicists. But I don’t like referring to them as ‘fans’. I think it’s gross when people are, like, ‘I love my fans!’ You don’t even know them.” He continues, saying he thinks that’s probably dubious as he’s “quite insecure”, before booming, theatrically: “ ‘How can you ever love me? You don’t!’ ” I have no idea how much of this conversation he will remember.
More under the cut!
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