IT WAS ROBERT Pattinson’s idea to take a pottery class. Since becoming a father this past March, the 38-year-old English actor has been searching for what he calls “healthy” hobbies. He’s considered bonsai (“they just start rotting”), trapeze (“can’t do that in public”), tennis (“not enough spatial awareness”) and dance (“my spinal cord freezes”). Two decades into his film career, he seems restless for new ways to express himself that don’t require a crew of hundreds or any of the baggage that comes with being one of the world’s most famous men. In recent years, he invented the recipe for a bastardized arancini-like dish called piccolini cuscino, or “little pillow” (“I got quite deep into it with a frozen-food manufacturer”); a nine-foot-long sofa with armrests as wide as the seat (“It weighs a ton — that’s probably one of the reasons it’s difficult to sell”); and pants with vertical pockets (“Why do they always have to be sticking out like weird little ears?”). He’s also been designing a straight-back chair with a slit running down the center of the cushion that “opens up for you like you’re in a kind of cocoon,” he says. To illustrate the idea, he built a maquette with a Fleshlight sex toy and an empty toilet paper roll.
On a gray August afternoon, I meet the actor at his friend’s house in De Beauvoir Town, a leafy neighborhood in northeast London where he and his fiancée, the English actress and musician Suki Waterhouse, have been staying with their baby girl while visiting from Los Angeles, and walk to a ceramics studio about a mile down the road. In a week, Waterhouse, 32, will open for Taylor Swift at Wembley Stadium, playing songs from her newly released second album, “Memoir of a Sparklemuffin.” By then, Pattinson will be in Canada shooting a movie with Jennifer Lawrence, but first he wanted to rerecord a voice-over for his next feature, “Mickey 17,” a dystopian satire by Bong Joon Ho, the Oscar-winning South Korean director of “Parasite” (2019). For now, though, Pattinson is hunched over a worktable, hand-sculpting a mug with a distinctly phallic handle. “It’s a giant carrot,” he clarifies — a gift for his hosts. They must really like carrots, I offer, but the joke doesn’t land. “I just think it’d be quite satisfying to have a cup this large,” he says. As I begin to wonder if I’ve offended him, he leans back to appraise his work. “It’s got a bit of a curve in it,” he says with a smirk. Intentionally making a clay penis in front of a journalist isn’t just a choice; it’s a challenge. “I’d love to see how you’re going to use this,” he tells me.
Despite appearing at age 17 in “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” (2005) and becoming a media fixation a few years later for playing a besotted vampire in all five “Twilight” films — at the height of the franchise’s success, he’d hire decoy cars and hide in trunks to avoid being swarmed by fans and paparazzi — Pattinson is surprisingly unguarded. He doesn’t take his craft or himself too seriously: In a span of less than 30 minutes, he tells me that he’s ignorant, frail, terrified, egomaniacal, terrible, rage-filled and vain. The lone press clipping in his London childhood bedroom is a framed copy of People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive issue from a year he wasn’t even included. (George Clooney gave it to him as a gag.) Recently, he dug out his acting awards and put them on a shelf; within days, he’d returned them to his storage unit.
It’s a strange era to be a Hollywood actor. Early in Pattinson’s career, the rise of social media destroyed the tabloid economy — which, even though it was invasive, did keep people talking about him. (“It was an insane time,” says his friend Zac Efron, 37, who in 2006 starred in “High School Musical.” “I was invested in making sure he was all right because I knew what it was doing to me.”) In 2020, Pattinson’s time-travel movie, “Tenet,” directed by Christopher Nolan, was used as a test balloon to determine whether audiences would return to theaters after pandemic restrictions began to ease. (They didn’t.) And although his superhero film “The Batman” came out in 2022, the second installment in Matt Reeves’s trilogy probably won’t be released until fall 2026, partly because of last year’s labor strikes. “I could genuinely be retiring by the end of them,” Pattinson says.
For so many of his peers, the hallmarks of what was once considered a successful film career — the security of a franchise role with a big director; the prestige of some work in acclaimed indies; the freedom to try any genre; the power to say no to television — now seem impossible and outdated. It’s not enough for today’s marquee names to deliver a compelling performance; they’re also expected to learn TikTok choreography and eat spicy chicken wings on YouTube. And although there are still leading men who hail from an artistic tradition — Timothée Chalamet, Adam Driver, Daniel Kaluuya — they run the risk, especially in an age of online finger wagging, when public figures are afraid of being too authentic, of coming across like weak facsimiles of the difficult men who once inspired them. If Marlon Brando were alive today, even he’d have to memorize his lines; there’d be too many internet boyfriends (Michael B. Jordan, Charles Melton, Paul Mescal) ready to replace him.
To his surprise, Pattinson, who rarely makes public appearances and doesn’t have social media, has emerged as one of the last movie stars. “Not in a million years did I think I’d still be doing this when I got my first job,” he says. “I can’t believe this is still going.” By managing to avoid the clichés of childhood fame, he’s also retained a certain mystique; he neither descended into addiction nor had to spend his adulthood proving his credibility. (Even in this regard, he occupies an unusual space: unlike method actors such as Christian Bale or Jeremy Strong, who often seem quite grave, he’s not a downer.) Perhaps because he started so young or because he’s handsome and weird, he gets to have it both ways: Like the heartthrobs who emerged during the indie boom of the 1990s — Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves — he’s a character actor who happened to become a leading man. Writing in The Times, the critic Manohla Dargis described Pattinson in 2019 as having one of the most “mesmerizing — and pleasurably unnerving — physiognomies in movies,” noting that in one performance his eyes “widen into bulges and tremors of emotion that ping under a masklike vacancy.” Instead of sticking to an archetype — for a while, he was in danger of playing a brooding boyfriend in perpetuity — he approaches each part, whether it’s a slimy preacher in Antonio Campos’s “The Devil All the Time” (2020) or a talking bird in Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron” (2023), with gonzo conviction. “If you turn up with a strong idea,” he says, “people have no choice but to mold it.”
Part of his charm comes from being British; like Charlie Cox, Jamie Dornan, Andrew Garfield and Eddie Redmayne, all of whom Pattinson befriended early in his career, he has a blokey quality that makes him more endearing than his American counterparts. (He doesn’t sound disingenuous when, for example, he complains about having bad posture or looking like he’s “hiding behind a curtain” in most men’s fashion.) On his first few features, he felt anxious and out of place. “I couldn’t define the stage properly,” he says. “I didn’t realize that you have to make a line between the world of the movie and the world of reality.” Ever since, he begins each film by walking around the set and touching the walls. “I know what the parameters are, and it makes you feel more secure.”
One gets the feeling that Pattinson wants to be an actor without having to be a celebrity — but that the experience of fame is itself a kind of performance, something he’s learned to act his way through. Not long ago, he rewatched a televised interview that he did in 2011, during which he told a fabricated story about seeing a clown die in a little-car explosion as a child. “There was absolutely no hesitation at all [in my voice],” he says with a combination of pride and alarm. “I’m like, ‘What on earth? Are you possessed?’” In truth, he was just bored. (Other lies and embellishments he’s told interviewers over the years: that he was a women’s hand model; that there’s a deleted “Twilight” scene involving coprophilia; that he got rid of a stalker by taking her to dinner and tiring her with his problems.) During that period, he says, “the only thing people would ever ask me about was being famous. You go into, like, a fugue state.” Then, to help balance his cup, he lobs some of the excess clay off the protruding handle and smiles. Even at his most sincere, he’s never not performing a little.
THIS PAST NEW Year’s, Pattinson and Waterhouse took a trip to St. Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean. At passport control, the immigration officer said to him, “Hey, you’re the guy from ‘Twilight.’ Why’d you stop acting?” Pattinson wasn’t sure how to respond. “I was like …, ‘I’m Batman?’” he says. “She just laughed.” To be fair, fans of Pattinson’s earlier work probably weren’t lining up to see Werner Herzog’s biography of the cartographer Gertrude Bell (2015’s “Queen of the Desert”) or a Brady Corbet mood piece based on a short story by Jean-Paul Sartre (“The Childhood of a Leader,” that same year).
In 2012, a few months before the release of “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2,” the final film in the series, Pattinson played a billionaire hedge fund manager in an adaptation of the 2003 Don DeLillo novel “Cosmopolis,” his first of two collaborations with the director David Cronenberg, in which much of the action, including an erotic prostate exam, takes place in the back of a limousine. “I used to think, ‘I need to figure out the logic of where this character was born, his social class, what his parents did,’” Pattinson says. “With Cronenberg, I realized that it can be about the musicality of words and how they make you feel to say them.” In 2017, he played a small-time crook in Josh and Benny Safdie’s crime thriller “Good Time,” a study in near-feral desperation. (Lawrence, 34, says she was interested in working with him after watching that one: “I wanted to even just see whatever film he was doing.”) And in 2019, roughly an hour into David Michôd’s “The King,” based on a few of William Shakespeare’s late 16th-century history plays, he appeared as a sadistic dauphin with a preposterous French accent, making lewd hand gestures and delivering some of the movie’s silliest, most diabolical dialogue. “The great fear always is that you end up with ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail,’” Michôd said at the time. For Pattinson, that might have been the goal.
The American filmmaker Robert Eggers, 41, who directed Pattinson and Willem Dafoe in “The Lighthouse,” a 2019 horror movie about a pair of 19th-century lighthouse keepers who unravel into madness, says that “Rob likes to make unexpected choices to surprise his acting partners, and he doesn’t want to use that up without the camera there. There is a rehearsal process for Rob, but it’s in his trailer.” For the duration of the 35-day shoot in Nova Scotia, Pattinson, whose character masturbates while thinking about a mermaid and gets eaten by a flock of gulls, rarely spoke to anyone on set and spent most of the production alone in a dark tent workshopping grotesque facial expressions. “The main thing is constantly remembering what your job is,” he says. “It’s a discipline to not use your energy on anything other than that.”
On our way back to Pattinson’s friend’s house, some clouds form and he removes his sunglasses. Even though two of his most recent movies, “Tenet” and “The Batman,” grossed a combined $1 billion, and he’s modeled for Dior Homme since 2013, appearing on billboards and bus stops, he passes a row of busy pubs unnoticed. Now that he’s older, the hysteria has died down. “There’s something about the nature of being fresh meat,” he says. “They thought, ‘You’re not even a human.’” Bruce Wayne, the Gotham City industrialist who avenges his parents’ murder by fighting crime, is one of cinema’s most iconic characters — Pattinson still has the costume that he wore as a child — but in the new version, so far at least, he’s almost never shown without a mask. “That was my one idea for Bruce,” says Pattinson. “He’s been portrayed until now as a playboy. But what if he’s completely socially inept and kind of agoraphobic?”
There’s a scene in “The Batman” in which Bruce tells Alfred, his butler and father figure, about the burden of having an alter ego. “If I can’t change things here, if I can’t have an effect,” he says, “I don’t care what happens to me.” The line stuck with Pattinson; he, too, clearly wonders what would happen if he stopped trying to live up to, or dismantled, the persona that he’s created. Early on, he realized that he was just a projection of other people’s fantasies. “I was very aware,” he says, “that no one was really thinking about me.” When I ask Pattinson what he was like as a child, he stops walking. “I … don’t know,” he says. At another point in our conversation, he compares his younger self to a perfectly fine but otherwise forgettable bowl that he’d sculpted: “Just sort of there.”
Pattinson grew up across town in Barnes, a pretty suburb in southwest London. His mother, Clare, was a model scout. His father, Richard, sold vintage cars. He was an average student and bad at sports, but he enjoyed listening to and playing music. “Stealing things was my main preoccupation,” he says, namely pornographic magazines and chocolate bars. (Again, his stories can be hard to corroborate.) At 15, Pattinson, who has two older sisters, joined a local theater group. Not long after, he successfully auditioned to play Reese Witherspoon’s son in Mira Nair’s “Vanity Fair,” a 2004 adaptation of the mid-19th-century William Makepeace Thackeray novel about English society. It was only after watching the film at the premiere that he found out his scenes had been cut from the final edit; the following year, that movie’s casting director, who felt bad for him, suggested him for the role of a wizard in Mike Newell’s “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.”
Around that time, he and his childhood friend Tom Sturridge, also an actor, rented a place on Old Compton Street in the heart of Soho. “It was the most disgusting apartment I’ve ever seen,” Pattinson says fondly; he’s pretty sure that they were drunk when they signed the lease. Each January, Pattinson, who had no formal training, would travel with Sturridge to Los Angeles for pilot season, but nothing ever came of it. At home, he spent most nights performing songs on his guitar at open mics across the city. During the day, he auditioned for projects such as “Troy” (2004) and “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift” (2006). He arrived late and with a busted lip — from kissing, not fighting — to read for the title role in the fantasy film “Eragon” (2006). “There’s this scene where he finds a dragon egg and it’s supposed to be a heroic moment,” says the actor, who decided to approach it as a tragedy. “I remember my manager saying they thought I was on drugs.” Although he let people believe he was a drug dealer in secondary school — the rumor, started by him, was that he hid his stash in floppy disks — he was never as wild as some of his peers. “There used to be a big party scene in L.A.,” he says. “The idea of getting into a car for 15 minutes to get anywhere at all, it made me stay in my house. And then you go completely insane.”
IN THE OPENING sequence of “Mickey 17,” out in April, Pattinson’s title character, a crew member on a space colonization mission, is about to freeze to death, becoming, in his own words, “a meat Popsicle.” The scene is played for laughs; his final breath is more like a whimper. But Pattinson has his own way of forcing you to consider the humanity in characters who have been dismissed or overlooked, whether he’s playing a photographer tasked with getting a portrait of James Dean (in 2015’s “Life”) or the aide-de-camp to a British explorer (in 2017’s “The Lost City of Z”). Mickey, a down-on-his-luck journeyman who accidentally signs up to be a so-called expendable — someone who undertakes dangerous tasks for the sake of the expedition and gets regenerated each time he dies — isn’t even sure he deserves to live. Burdened by the guilt and shame of a wasted life, he martyrs himself to repent for his own mediocrity, but also because he hopes to get it right next time. In his final moments, a friend asks, “Hey, Mickey, what’s it feel like to die?” The relief on Pattinson’s face offers a difficult answer.
The actor’s first thought when reading Bong’s script, adapted from a 2022 Edward Ashton novel, was, “Oh, I want to do a Jim Carrey thing.” Although he knew that playing a victim of constant cruelty in the style of Lloyd Christmas, Carrey’s chip-toothed limo driver in “Dumb and Dumber” (1994), was, as he puts it, “an incredibly tight rope to walk,” the challenge thrilled him. Bong, 55, who draws all of his own storyboards, says that Pattinson was eager to contribute, offering to help revise dialogue and “enlightening us with humor and knowledge of slangs that I would have never come across otherwise.” (One assumes that Mickey’s analogy for getting tasered — “boofing an electric eel” — was the actor’s suggestion.) In Bong, Pattinson found a creative match. “He’s an unusual guy,” says Pattinson, noting that Bong would shoot the last line of a scene first and make changes to the script on the fly. “Everyone on set was like, ‘What is happening?’” Later, Pattinson tells me, “The movies you like most are the ones that feel so impossible at the beginning. It’s such a leap of faith — just sticking the landing is cool.”
“Mickey 17” isn’t a subtle allegory. Mark Ruffalo plays a commander with a settler-colonial kink who invokes fear and religion to incite violence against the inhabitants of another planet. There’s a foiled assassination plot; a young Black woman emerges as his political rival. But the film, which was shot in 2022 and delayed because of the actors’ strike, could also be read as a metaphor for the fickle nature of fame: Mickey doesn’t realize what he’s signed up for until it’s too late — until his livelihood depends on the whims of others. And as he withstands all manner of abuse and exploitation, he does so with the awareness of a newer model waiting to replace him. “There’s something about Rob that naturally draws your sympathy,” says Bong. “It felt like he, too, would endure hardship and injustice with an innocent smile.”
A WEEK AFTER our pottery lesson, Pattinson calls me from a hotel room in Calgary. He’s there to shoot “Die, My Love,” Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation of the 2012 debut novel by the Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz. Lawrence plays a version of Harwicz’s unnamed narrator, a young mother with postpartum psychosis who, in the book, daydreams about killing herself and her family; Pattinson, her husband in the film, says it’s “hilarious.” (Others might not share his sense of humor: He also considers Claire Denis’s “High Life,” a 2018 head-scratcher about artificial insemination among space prisoners — in which Pattinson’s character is raped by a scientist played by Juliette Binoche — to be a comedy.) He seems excited about the project, if somewhat lonely. On his way to a morning dance class required for the role, he watched a livestream of Waterhouse’s Wembley set on his phone.
On the Covers
Of the four tracks she performed, at least one of them, “To Love,” is about him. “Is there a universe where our paths never crossed?” she sang. “Where I caught your eye but then someone arrived, and we both forgot?” The couple, who got engaged last year, met in 2018 at a Los Angeles house party. “She was sitting opposite me,” says Pattinson, who doesn’t remember much else about the game of Werewolf that they were playing with Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Al Pacino and other actors. “Suki and I kept making each other laugh, to the point where someone told us we weren’t taking the game seriously enough. That was a very, very sweet moment.” He delivers that last part with an affected lilt, something he does when he’s feeling vulnerable.
Since starting a family with Waterhouse, Pattinson has seemingly become a little more earnest. Although he once dreamed of living in the attic of a cathedral (“with one chair,” he says), they recently bought a 1920s Spanish Colonial-style house north of Hollywood and keep a place in New York. Having a daughter, too, has changed him in unexpected ways. Leading up to her arrival, he thought about buying a gun to protect their house. “But then she comes out,” he says, “and she’s just a little potato who poos.” Given the instability of the movie business, he adds that the permanence of fatherhood has grounded him. Eggers has noticed a marked difference in his collaborator: When they met in 2016, Pattinson was “bent over in his chair with his vape pen looking over his shoulder all the time,” the director recalls. “But I don’t see it in his personality anymore.”
At work, Pattinson also seems to be having more fun. His production company, Icki Eneo Arlo — the name is “just a scramble of letters,” he says — which he started two years ago with his former assistant Brighton McCloskey, has some 20 features and series in development, including a documentary on the United States Blind Soccer team; a Lance Oppenheim-directed film called “Primetime” that was inspired by NBC’s “Dateline: To Catch a Predator”; and a comedy about a couple trying to save their marriage through cuckoldry. “If you’re just an actor, you don’t really meet with anyone other than directors who want you to play an English prince,” he says. “Doing this, I’ve met so many different people and I have something to provide them. It’s made me more understanding of what I’m doing as a performer, as well.”
One day, he might like to direct. For now, producing films provides enough of a contingency plan, particularly for someone like Pattinson, who, as he puts it, thinks that “everything is falling apart all the time.” Some of that, he concedes, is imagined. But there’s another aspect of the film industry — where today’s bright star becomes yesterday’s news — that’s very real to him. Before we hang up, he tells me he often returns to something that Paul Newman, one of the great American movie stars, once said about the life span of an actor: “At the beginning of your career it’s, ‘Who is Paul Newman?’ And then it’s, ‘Get me Paul Newman.’ Then it’s, ‘Get me a young Paul Newman.’ Then it’s, ‘Who is Paul Newman?’” Pattinson likes the idea that everyone starts their story as a total unknown. That’s also, he adds, with a mix of resignation and relief, how it usually ends.
Grooming by Emily Blair. Set design by Jamie Dean Studio at WSM. Producer: Hen’s Tooth Productions. Digital tech: Michael Preman. Lighting tech: Ari Sadok. Lighting assistants: Jack Buster Chamberlain, Kurt Lavastida. Set designer’s assistants: Ella Bourne, Billy Czyzyk, Sam Cooper. Tailor: Gayane Mnatsakanyan. Stylist’s assistant: Gemma Valdes-Joffroy
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