Robert Pattinson Australia

INTERVIEW + PHOTOSHOOT: “Inside the Making of The Odyssey” (GQ Magazine, June 2026)

Zach Baron from GQ Magazine interviewed Rob, Matt Damon and Tom Holland in relation to the making of The Odyssey. At the bottom of the post is Rob’s excerpt, but click on the link to read the full interview. There is also the video above where Rob, Matt and Tom chat. Below are some great photos thanks to Alex Prager. It’s been a wonderful thing to wake up to:

Here’s a short vid of the BTS of the photoshoot

“On the first day that Pattinson arrived in Favignana, in early April 2025, he went to the off-season resort he was meant to stay at, only to find it completely deserted. By this point, production had been underway for more than a month and the crew was already beginning to flag. “I was sitting in the hotel bar by myself,” Pattinson said, “and then people started drifting in, and I’ve never seen people look so exhausted. And this was only a third of the way. I started a third of the way through the movie, and they’d already been to [two] countries by that point and people just looked like…. I mean, at the end of every day people were broken.”

…

[Nolan] operates in secrecy and compels cooperation. Pattinson said that when Nolan called to tell him about The Odyssey, “I was like, ‘Yeah, can’t wait to read it.’ He’s like, ‘You want to read it? Everyone else just said yes.’

…

Nolan is famously cagey about himself, preferring to focus on the work, which he can control. “Chris is quite superstitious,” Pattinson told me. “There’s an element of mysticism. Though he’ll be like: ‘There isn’t.’ 

…

Pattinson once had to shoot a scene in The Odyssey responding to a far-off sound. “I can’t see anything, apart from the camera,” he recounted, “and I was just asking Chris, because I’m supposed to react to this noise and I’m like, ‘Are you going to cue the noise? Where should I look?’ And he said, ‘Oh no, we’ve got Damon doing it.’ And Matt and Anne Hathaway are doing the entire scene about 200 feet away and I can’t even see them. And he’s walking and talking just to kick a bowl. Fucking crazy.”

…

Pattinson, who has acted in three different films with Holland, told me: “I feel like he kind of lived out his sort of crazy years in the amount of time which you’re supposed to, which is maybe, like, eight years, and I really stretched mine out. I’m like, ‘I’m going to be 22 till I’m 39.’ But it’s weird. I feel like everyone from his generation is very…. They’ve got quite sensible.”

…

Robert Pattinson, hair gloriously unkempt, was sitting at a table outside at the Polo Lounge, talking about his new life in Los Angeles. Pattinson has lived here on and off since his Twilight days; he once owned a giant home that he wandered like a ghost and then eventually sold, in Los Feliz. Now, he said, he was renting a house in Beverly Hills, on the side of town he’d never lived in before, with a home gym and his partner, Suki Waterhouse, and their two-year-old child. “I always thought I was an Eastside hipster guy,” he said. “I would only ever come to Beverly Hills for my agency and stuff. Now I’m like, Everything’s kind of nice. Maybe I’ve turned bougie.”

Pattinson and I last saw each other in 2020—deep COVID. We spoke over a few days of dropped phone calls and blurry FaceTimes. It suited Pattinson, who has a feral vibe at the best of times. When I arrived at the Polo Lounge, Pattinson was already there, fidgeting. Was it about to be Oscar weekend? (Yes.) He had no idea, even though when I turned on the broadcast, a few days later, he was a presenter. He had a new film, The Drama, coming out soon. “I literally completely forgot which movie I’m even promoting,” he said to me. “And it doesn’t really make any difference because I’m so bad at talking about any of them anyway. I’m trying to do The Drama stuff, and I’m like, I’ve totally forgotten how to do interviews. And I loved our one so much and I’m kind of like…. I’m trying to think, Can you just do weird stuff all the time?”

Like a plea. I said I’d do my best.

The home gym, Pattinson said, was to train for The Batman: Part II, which he was supposed to start shooting soon. “And I just heard from the stunt guy the other day. He said, ‘Ooh, 11 weeks of nights.’ I’m like, ‘Excuse me?’ I’m like, ‘No one’s even sent me a schedule.’ ” (As for the gym, he said that after the first Batman came out, everyone was like: “ ‘You didn’t work out at all.’ I worked out every fucking day. Even after that, I still look like I didn’t work out. I worked out twice a day at, like, three o’clock in the morning.” He blamed the interviews he’d given for the lukewarm reception to his superhero body, including one with me where he said exercise was uncool: “I’m like, It’s just because I said it in an interview. I was trying to sound cool!”)

A few days ago, he and Waterhouse celebrated their daughter’s second birthday. So far, he said, she’d mostly just been on the road with them—“Suki’s been on tour a couple of times. I mean, my daughter’s been to way more places than…. I mean, it’s insane. She’s come to every single set, already done Mardi Gras. And what else? Just in Boston for ages.”

Pattinson said he thought having a kid had probably calmed him down, at least a bit. “I’m a little more relaxed about a lot of different things,” he said. “It gave me tons of energy when she was first born, like five months when I wasn’t doing anything and then just suddenly…. Normally I feel like I barely do any work. I mean, other than Batman, I’d work a few months a year, and then I’d spend the rest of the time figuring out where the party’s at. I think that element of my life…I mean, I’m literally going to bed so early. It’s just ridiculous. And then I saw some TikTok thing where they’re talking about going to bed early as, like, a drug addiction. They’re like, ‘Oh, have you tried going to bed at seven?’ It’s actually really fun.”

The Batman: Part II is set to shoot in London, near the Leavesden set where Warner Bros. is also filming the new Harry Potter TV series. “I’ve already looked and there’s a Harry Potter school,” he said, by which he meant: a school for the child actors on the show to take classes. Pattinson, who was part of the original Harry Potter franchise, used to be around something similar. He looked up whether he might enroll his daughter. “I was like, This is where you’re going to go to school. To Hogwarts. And I legitimately think that might actually be her first school.”

Pattinson was coming off a blur of films—six in a row, including The Drama, Die My Love, Dune: Part Three, and The Odyssey. The production of The Batman: Part II kept getting pushed. “I’m like, ‘Well, I’ll do another movie in between,’ ” Pattinson said. “And then I ended up doing fucking a lot of movies.” He produced and shot a movie called Primetime, set in Boston, and then accidentally showed up on The Odyssey set with a Boston accent and some typically self-mocking thoughts about becoming a producer. “You think if you’re the producer, you have ultimate authority Then you realize you have no authority at all. You have all the responsibility and no executive power.” He started making fun of himself: “It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m your secretary,’ And you suddenly realize you are for the director what the director is for actors. You’re just like a fucking shoulder to cry on. And I’m like, ‘No, I’m the talent.’ It’s very difficult.”

Pattinson’s part in The Odyssey is not big—he plays Antinous, one of the many suitors who have installed themselves at Ithaca, seeking the hand of Penelope (played by Anne Hathaway) while Odysseus is away. “My character’s a little like James Woods in Casino. That was my inspiration for it,” Pattinson said. “I thought it’d be quite nice to see it in Ithaca. And he’s like a little sleazy. I kept saying at my costume fitting, I was like, ‘I really want to have leopard underpants.’ I want to have it just coming out of my skirt, a little sparkly fur.”

When Pattinson and I talked six years ago, he’d been trying to get back into mainstream Hollywood filmmaking after a long detour of working with auteurs like the Safdie brothers on smaller-budget movies. (Damon asked me, about Pattinson: “He became a superstar and a heartthrob with the Twilight movies, right?” I said yes. “I didn’t see any of those,” Damon said. “And I had him in that bucket in my mind, and I wasn’t really paying attention. I just knew that there was all this kind of interest and attention in him. And then I saw Good Time and I was like, Who the fuck is this guy?”) Since he and I last spoke, Pattinson had been in Tenet and The Batman and a bunch of other things. I asked if it felt like his plan had worked. He said, basically: no.

“It’s funny, because when you do a big movie, you kind of forget almost immediately how frustrating it is. I mean, there’s just nothing worse in the world when you just can’t get the jobs,” Pattinson said. “I just remember after Batman I was thinking like, I’ll do another massive job afterwards, and I couldn’t find the thing. And it was incredibly frustrating because I thought there was like a secret door which opened and like suddenly all these different projects are there. They’re not. This doesn’t exist. And it’s because the whole industry’s different.”

His goal now was to have no goal. He had resigned himself to being himself. “There’s only so many times you can reinvent your narrative in the public eye or whatever,” he said. “And when you do it too many times, then people don’t trust you. Because it becomes more about, like, you want to have a little bit more crowd-pleasery kind of stuff. And then my instincts are just like…. I mean, my instincts for what the people want is so awful. It’s like my investment advice. Every single time I made an investment, it’s a fucking disaster.”