You gotta love PromoRob. We get all kinds of tidbits we're deprived off all the other long days of the year. WELT got a chance to sit down with Rob in Berlin and talk a little about The Lost City of Z and basically let Rob do his Rob musings. You will be amused by his musings.
I wasn't too into the editorial. It doesn't bring any new information to someone who's ROBsessed. It's always lovely to read Rob's words though and I highlighted them in case you breeze through the other parts we know like the back of our hand - Claudia, boy from Barnes, modeling days, Twilight and Harry Potter mentions, musical exploits...I think we should have done this interview! ;)
From WELT:
Robert Pattinson perches on the edge of a yellow sofa and fiddles with a bottle opener. The soft drink in front of him has been open for a while, but he doesn’t put it down. The British actor is nervous; his fingers continually stroke the wavy steel object as if it were a worry stone. He doesn’t like the media circus and rarely gives interviews like this one at Berlin’s Hotel de Rome.
Since the boy from Barnes in South West London was thrust into the limelight – where he has remained for the past ten years – he has feared talking nonsense or divulging details about his personal life, both, to him, are equally horrifying. His weapon: a self-deprecating sense of humour. Time and again he lets out a loud peel of resounding laughter, to make it clear just how laid-back he wants to be.
Because the problem is, the thirty-year-old shot to global fame with the Twilight saga and he has been trying to shake off the role of the romantic vampire Edward Cullen who fell in love with mortal Bella ever since.
His new film is also such an attempt. In the epic The Lost City of Z Pattinson plays neither the beau nor the seducer. In fact, (forgive me) he’s not even good looking. For his role as researcher Henry Costin, he fasted, let his beard grow out and had a prosthetic gaping wound crawling with maggots glued onto his sunken cheek.
“We used real maggots, it was disgusting,” he laughs loudly as he talks about shooting the film in the Columbian rainforest. “The maggot scene where I ate one from my face was actually cut out of the movie.” Instead there is a second where Costin’s shirt rides up as he bathes in the Amazon. Revealing his back. No, there are no nude scenes, not even a kissing scene, with Robert Pattinson.
His good looks were encouraged from an early age. At twelve, his Mum got him his first few jobs via her modelling agency. Back then, his two sisters liked to introduce their androgynous brother as “Claudia”. After puberty, his physique became too masculine and the bookings began to dwindle.
Pattinson dubs it “the most unsuccessful modelling career ever”. Pure coquetry. Currently, he’s a model for Dior, photographed by Karl Lagerfeld. Right now he’s wearing a monochrome outfit from the French fashion label: white shirt with cardigan, jeans and sneakers, all in black. His famous hair is deliberately mussed.
“I think pretty much every actor feels like a fraud in some ways,” he says self-critically, as he strokes his two-day beard with his free hand. He doesn’t know why. “Perhaps they’re a type of people who are attracted to playing other people, I guess.” His own fame still seems to perplex him somewhat.
At 15 he ended up on the stage as a substitute in a London theatre by chance. An agent was in the audience. While other actors struggle for years, his third role brought him worldwide attention: In the fourth Harry Potter film, he met an untimely death as the handsome Cedric Diggory in a fight with Lord Voldemort. It meant the 19-year-old was part of an international blockbuster franchise. No mean feat for someone who never went to drama school.
“Every movie you do is like going to acting school. You don’t need a teacher, you can find one in every director,” says the self-taught thespian today. He finds it strange to think that there is only one prescribed or correct way to play a role. “It’s all totally random.”
Not Robert Pattinson. At 22 he became a sought-after sex symbol in Twilight. At 23 his salary hit the 20 million mark – he had made it onto Hollywood’s A-list. “I‘ve never really thought about what everybody else wants,” he says, almost apologetically. “Or not even about a career! Maybe one day I’ll have to.” Another loud laugh. Ha ha. “Might be coming pretty soon.”
Too late. In 2010, Forbes and Time Magazine named him as one of their 100 Most Influential People.
Posts
- 
- 
- 
- 
- 
- 
