There were only two good things that happened in the first six months of 2020. One was Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite winning Best Picture. The other: Robert Pattinson blowing up his microwave while trying to invent a pasta dish involving cornflakes and nine packs of pre-sliced cheese. Would it surprise you that, five years later, these two isolated incidents are now connected?
This weekend sees the release of Mickey 17, the long-delayed sci-fi dark comedy directed by Bong and starring Pattinson and… Pattinson. It also brings the end to another wild press tour, where the actor has talked about everything from “scent dyslexia” to his preference of getting a dog over visiting space (?), and participated in a viral TikTok game involving a cow.
Here’s the thing about Robert Pattinson: he’s a great actor, someone who excels at action (The Batman), comedy (The Lighthouse; yes, it’s a comedy), sci-fi drama (High Life), Westerns (Damsel), animation (The Boy and the Heron), and panic attacks (Good Times). But he’s also a total weirdo. Let it be known that I say this with complete and utter affection. Admiration even.
Take an incident that happened in 2011. During an interview with Matt Lauer (I must reiterate: this was 2011) on Today, Pattinson told a story about witnessing a clown car blowing up at the circus. “The little car exploded — the joke car exploded on him. Yeah, seriously,” he said. “Everyone ran out. It was terrifying… The only time I’ve ever been to a circus.” Over a decade later, Pattinson confessed he made the whole thing up. “There was absolutely no hesitation at all [in my voice],” he said in 2024 after revisiting the interview. “I’m like, ‘What on earth? Are you possessed?’ The only thing people would ever ask me about was being famous. You go into, like, a fugue state.”
This is not the only thing that Pattinson has made up because a) he was bored, and b) he’s a scamp:
-He lied about inviting a stalker to dinner
-He lied about a deleted scene in Twilight involving coprophilia
-He lied about working as a women’s hand model
-He lied about not working out to play Batman
Did Mr. Waterhouse lie about watching a horror movie while holding “two kitchen knives” because he was scared someone was going to break into his house? We’ll find out someday!
No offense to Timothée Chalamet, who was very good at playing Bob Dylan, but Pattinson better embodies the singer’s mischievous “I was with the carnival off and on for six years” spirit. He understands that sometimes a ridiculous lie is better than the boring truth.
Pattinson’s freakiness (not that kind; now who’s the freak?) extends beyond making sh*t up, though.
A-list stars typically don’t conceal their recognizable pipes when they’re doing voiceover work for an animated movie. Not Pattinson, though. In The Boy and The Heron, he sounds like he’s regurgitating a pile of cigarettes. He also loves doing (non-problematic) accents — the wilder, the better. Pattinson refused a dialect coach for The Devil All The Time, where he plays a fire-and-brimstone Southern reverend, and didn’t let anyone in the cast and crew hear the (insane) voice he came up with until the first day of shooting. More actors should listen to that “little gremlin” inside of them, and take wild swings like finding inspiration from Ren and Stimpy mixed with Steve Buscemi in Fargo.
There’s something Pattinson loves even more than weird accents, however: playing freaky lil’ guys. “In the last five or six years, I’ve almost exclusively played weirdos,” he said, presumably proudly, to Vanity Fair in 2020. And that was before he portrayed cinema’s most notorious loner weirdo.
The early, overwhelming success of Twilight has allowed Pattinson a creative (and financial) freedom that really only Kristen Stewart and Daniel Radcliffe can relate to. He wants “to do strange things,” and auteur filmmakers like Claire Denis, Robert Eggers, and Christopher Nolan are thrilled to work with him for his talent and for “the madness in his eyes,” as Bong told USA Today.
In that sense, Mickey 17, which features Pattinson playing multiple versions of the same character, is the perfect movie for him. He’s finally found someone who can match his freak: himself.
