Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe interview with Esquire UK

Below is an extract from Rob’s interview with Esquire UK (click on the link to read the full interview/article) and enjoy the photos below. The interview is great and there’s some interesting comments:

Pattinson arrived early in Halifax, before his director and co-star, to psych himself into the role of the saturnine Ephraim. Having approached Eggers after seeing “The Witch”, in the hope that they might at some point work together, Pattinson had declined the director’s first suggestion, for a part in a more conventional, mainstream film that the director was then developing.

“He said he was only interested in doing weird things,” Eggers says. “So when The Lighthouse came around I said that if he doesn’t find this weird enough, I guess we’ll never work together”.

It’s true, Pattinson says, that at that time, in 2016, he wanted to do the weirdest stuff in the world. Mission accomplished, Rob!) Still, he spent a good deal of time agonising over whether or not to take the role in The Lighthouse. I remember reading it and I thought it was very funny, but I was also thinking, I don’t understand how the tone would work?

When Dafoe signed on, Pattinson was excited. I knew Willem could bring that kind of anarchic energy, he says, but I really didn’t know how I would do it at all. Dafoe, he says, in one of his many moments of self-effacement, has one of those faces where he can literally sit in any room in the world, doing almost nothing, and it’s fascinating to watch. Whereas I sort of blend in with the chair I’m sitting on

Before filming began, the pair spent a week in rehearsals. Pattinson dislikes rehearsing, preferring to do his experimenting on camera. It was very, very frustrating, he says. I just couldn’t achieve what they wanted me to achieve in that room. Robert [Eggers] was getting furious with me because I was just sitting there, completely monotone the whole time. He could not stand it. Pattinson tells the story with no rancor whatsoever. He knows it sounds funny, but it wasn’t at the time. I just don’t know how to perform it until we’re performing it. By the end of the week, I’m thinking, I’m going to get fired before we’ve even started. I definitely feel like, with the rehearsal period, we were quite angry with each other by the end of it. Literally, we’d finish for the day, I’d fucking slam out the door and go home.

I knew that there were diminishing expectations of me throughout the week of rehearsals, he says. I definitely became an underdog. They’re like, “Wow, this was a big mistake. He’s really shit.”

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The attraction of more avant garde or out material, Pattinson says, is it allows him to let rip in a way he never could in real life. Pattinson compares the experience of acting in a film likeThe Lighthouse with joyriding. A lot of the movies I’ve done recently, you literally feel as if you’ve stolen a car and you’re kind of careening through stuff. Such are the fantasies, perhaps, of a boy who grew up with a father who imported American sports cars for a living.)

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It’s hard not to speculate that yes, it might be really annoying. “There’s a scene,” Pattinson remembers, “where Willem’s kind of sleeping on me and we’re really, really drunk and I felt like we’re completely lost in the scene and I’m sitting there trying to make myself gag and Robert [Eggers] told me off because Willem’s looking at him going: ‘If he throws up on me, I’m leaving the set.’ I had absolutely no idea this whole drama was unfolding.”

In some ways, Pattinson concedes, all this acting out is a reaction to his terrifying early super-fame. He speaks of himself in the second person when talking about it. “For a long time you’re very self-conscious in the street. You’re hiding a lot, so [on set] you have an excuse to be wild. It’s like being an adrenaline junkie. And also, when you don’t know how to do something, why not just run headfirst into a wall? See what happens. I haven’t got any other ideas.”

Rob on The Batman:

It’s by no means the only Robert Pattinson film on its way to us, either. There’s The King, David Michôd’s retelling of Henry V, with Timothée Chalamet in the title role and Pattinson as the French Dauphin. The Devil All the Time, an adaptation of Donald Ray Pollock’s lurid gothic novel, in which he plays a wicked evangelical preacher in the Deep South of the Fifties. Waiting for the Barbarians, from a JM Coetzee novel, with Johnny Depp and Mark Rylance. The Stars at Noon, for Claire Denis again, based on a Denis Johnson novel.

Meanwhile, he’ll be preparing for his most high-profile mainstream role since Twilight, as the Caped Crusader himself in The Batman. “It’s kind of insane. I was so far away from ever thinking it was a realistic prospect. I literally do not understand how I’ve got it, at all,” he says. The rest of us might reflect that he’s got it because he is one of the most watchable and unpredictable male stars currently working. And, as Dafoe notes, he certainly has the jaw for it.