Source: The Guardian - Dec 2019 | Written by Alex Moshakis
Do you want to hear a funny thing about Robert Pattinson? Robert Pattinson is convinced he doesn’t know how to act. Willem Dafoe can act, Pattinson thinks. Willem Dafoe can act the socks off anyone in the business. And Joaquin Phoenix. Joaquin Phoenix could tie his shoelaces on film and be nominated for an award. And Bruce Willis – Bruce Willis! – now there’s a leading man. But Robert Pattinson? Nope. “I only know how to play scenes, like, three ways,” he says. Three! That’s all. Despite more than a decade in the industry. “I’m nervous on, like, every single movie.”
Pattinson, who is 33, is sitting in a booth in a low-lit restaurant in Notting Hill, west London, dunking table bread into a pot of something. It’s the early evening, dark and cold outside. He has arrived from rehearsals for The Batman, which started not long ago and which are taking place, to his delight, in the studio in which he filmed Harry Potter in the mid-aughts. The Batman is the first time he’s worked in a studio in “like, forever,” and his first mainstream leading role since he retired his best-known character, Twilight’s Edward Cullen, sexy vampire. That was in 2012.
Maybe he’s tired now. Or maybe he’s had a bad day. Maybe he’s arriving at the studio every morning and not quite getting Batman’s vibe. Maybe he’ll never get Batman’s vibe, and people will finally agree he really can’t act, and his career will come screeching to its inevitable end, and the whole world will fold in on itself.
Which are the kind of thoughts Robert Pattinson has.
“I’m a catastrophist,” he says, laughing. Pattinson laughs a lot and goes for it: closes his eyes, throws back his head, reveals the square jaw and the fine stubble and the underside of the slightly skew-whiff nose, and lets out a loud, unfiltered giggle. “I’m always thinking that the worst-case scenario is actually going to happen. So when it does happen, I’m like: ‘Gah! OK! I’m prepared!’”
Other actors suffer from bouts of false modesty. But Pattinson is wholeheartedly committed to the concept of his ordinariness. He is not “totemic,” he says, like other traditional leading men. And he tends not to work hard in the lead-up to filming, because what if he somehow conjures some very good acting before an actual take, and can’t reproduce whatever spontaneous fluke that created it when the cameras roll? “If I show it in rehearsals,” he says, “then it’s doomed to failure immediately.”
It’s strange to hear, all this worry and self-doubt, because over the past six or seven years Pattinson has been slowly, forcefully, making fine films with very good directors. He has worked with David Cronenberg on Cosmopolis and Claire Denis on High Life, Werner Herzog on Queen of the Desert and the Safdie Brothers on Good Time. In The King, David Michôd’s kind of retelling of Shakespeare’s Henriad, which came out on Netflix earlier this year, Pattinson plays a French prince so brilliantly camp it was reported that his co-stars burst into laughter the first time they heard his accent. This kind of thing thrills Pattinson, because at least he got a reaction. “If I’m doing a scene and I see that the other actor is expecting me to do it the way I’m doing it, if I can just see that it hasn’t surprised them, I immediately feel stupid,” he says. Timothée Chalamet plays The King’s titular monarch, but it’s Pattinson scenes you remember: long blond hair; accent as thick as a block of beurre.
Next month, Pattinson will star in The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers’s two-hander about lighthouse keepers descending into madness on a remote and craggy island. He appears alongside Willem Dafoe, the actual actor, which was nerve-wracking, of course. “He’s got a tonne of energy,” Pattinson says, “and it’s intimidating.” Before scenes, Pattinson would punch himself in the face, or twirl around to create dizziness, or drink mud from puddles, or force himself to gag. He explains the process as necessary – a wild attempt to maximise creativity – because, you remember, he’s just so bad at acting. “Because I don’t really know how to act, I kind of wanted to somehow make it real, and one of the ways I’ve always thought makes that a little bit easier is if you shake up your physical state just before action. You end up walking into a scene having a different” – pause – “feeling.”
Read the full article at The Guardian.
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