Great interview with Rob for The Guardian during is UK promo for The Rover!
The Guardian: Robert Pattinson: ‘The Rover felt like a dream'
He made his name as teenage vampire heart-throb Edward Cullen. Then his turbulent romance with co‑star Kristen Stewart dominated the world’s gossip columns. Now Robert Pattinson is older, wiser and shedding his Hollywood pretty-boy image. He talks about his new role in David Michôd’s dystopian outback western The Rover
There is a moment in The Rover, David Michôd’s futuristic western set in the Australian outback, in which Robert Pattinson’s character sits in the cab of a truck at night listening to the radio play Keri Hilson’s hit Pretty Girl Rock. The night is black and the radio tinny, and softly Pattinson begins to sing along. “Don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful,” he sings, his voice high and whiny, the lyrics muffled by lips that cling to dirty teeth. “Don’t hate me ‘cause I’m beautiful.”
It’s a pivotal moment for Rey, the slow, needy, uncertain young man Pattinson plays, but it also feels like something of a reference point in the career of the actor himself; a small reminder for the audience of just how far he has run from his days as the pretty-boy Hollywood pin-up.
The Pattinson who walks into our interview this morning seems to play a similar trick, pointing out, two steps into the room, that the hotel carpet “looks like a Magic Eye picture”. And indeed it does – a bold, blurry pattern in stripes of cream and black. But Pattinson’s remark also serves to shifts attention neatly away from himself, as if he is weary of being the centre of it, the face that everyone stares at.
Pattinson was 22 when he was first cast as Edward Cullen in the Twilight Saga, the five-part movie adaptation of Stephanie Meyer’s best-selling teen vampire novels. Overnight he became one of Hollywood’s most adored young stars, pursued wherever he went by paparazzi and screaming fans. He was named “the most handsome man in the world” by Vanity Fair, and one of the 100 Most Influential People by Time. Amid all the fuss and the madness he embarked upon a tortuous relationship with his co-star, Kristen Stewart, that meant the young couple were rarely out of the gossip pages.
He is 28 now. The final Twilight instalment done, the Stewart romance finished, he is finally cutting a dash as a serious actor.
Early leading-man roles (Remember Me; Water for Elephants) have given way to more challenging characters – he earned impressive reviews for his portrayal of a young billionaire in David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, and will soon be seen in another Cronenberg project, Maps to the Stars – as well as starring alongside Nicole Kidman in the Gertrude Bell biopic Queen of the Desert.
But for now he is rooted in Michôd’s The Rover, a brilliantly dark story of a loner (Guy Pearce) in pursuit of a gang of ramshackle crooks who have stolen his car. En route, he acquires Rey (Pattinson), the brother of one of the thieves, whom they had left for dead at the scene of a botched robbery, and together they chug through the Australian desert, now a glowering, lawless land 10 years after a global economic collapse.
“I just thought it was strikingly original,” Pattinson says of first reading Michôd’s script. “Even in the way it looked on the page.
“David’s got a very specific way of writing dialogue. It’s very functional, the writing’s very harsh, it’s savage, but it didn’t feel just stylised writing – it was emotional as well. It just seemed so natural compared to something like No Country for Old Men. I always felt that was more like film writing. And this didn’t really feel like a film script – it felt like a dream.”
Pattinson has a very particular way of speaking: he will talk softly, intently about subjects you sense mean a great deal to him – Michôd’s writing, for instance, or the craft of acting – only to then sweep it to one side with a flourishing “It was crazy!” or a burst of wheezy, slightly wild laughter. It gives the impression of someone who has not quite yet settled into his skin.
He had to audition for The Rover – a process he loathes. “I’m quite good at doing meetings,” he says. “If I’m just meeting someone about a job I’m like a dog, especially if my agent’s said to me: ‘A lot of people want this job.’ Then I’m like: ‘Oh yeah? Then I will do anything to get it!’” What’s his technique? “I don’t know, I just become a bullshit artist!” he laughs. “That’s when I start acting! I’m really much better at doing it when the cameras aren’t rolling …”
But auditions petrify him. He has spoken of the good 45 minutes of “neuroses” he has to suffer before any audition can ever really begin. “I just can’t … I literally can’t do it,” he tries to explain. “It’s just me looking uncomfortable, trying to put on an American accent … or sitting in the corner, making myself throw up and punching myself in the face.” What helps get him past the neuroses, what happens after those excruciating 45 minutes that helps him perform. “Just that you think that someone actually believes you can do something,” he says. “That makes me sound like such an idiot. It’s crazy.”
But the joys of acting still outweigh these moments.
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