New Robert Pattinson interview and photos for Backstage magazine.

Getting Lost in the Work With Robert Pattinson

“If you’re about to do a scene and you get hit by a car, you’re gonna play it in a totally different way,” Robert Pattinson says between sips of coffee and discreet puffs on an electronic cigarette. The Midtown photo studio where we’ve met has been cleared; he wasn’t especially psyched about doing an interview while people, even his own people, buzzed about, chatting and listening in on what he had to say.

We’re talking about acting this November afternoon, which is apparently one of the many topics the 33-year-old feels he has to be careful about when speaking to a journalist. “My experience with press for many years was, like, a three-minute sound bite. So, if you try and talk about acting in a serious way, you sound like such a moron,” he explains. “Also, you never know; if someone’s going to be reading it and they didn’t like your work, you can suddenly look like an idiot. ‘I was doing this and I was thinking about this at the time.’ And they’re like, ‘Well, whatever you’re doing, it’s still shit!’ ”

As far as I can tell, Pattinson has never been hit by a car—not in his everyday life and certainly not just before playing a scene in any of the 28 films he’s appeared in since 2004. He did, however, reportedly go to other extreme lengths to get into character on the set of director Robert Eggers’ “The Lighthouse.” In the black-and-white psychological horror film, Pattinson stars alongside Willem Dafoe as a 19th-century lighthouse keeper who seems to be slowly losing his mind. A recent piece in the New York Times mentioned that Pattinson would gag himself and hit himself in the face before cameras rolled. He doesn’t deny this. “I think Willem said in this interview that I just try and drown myself in every scene,” he adds. “But I kinda like that!”

The point, he says, is to shock your body into a reactive state—acting being, as the cliché goes, reacting. “My only technique is sprinting up to a cliff and just jumping off it,” Pattinson says. “Sometimes it doesn’t even work at all and it just looks like you’re a lunatic. But then sometimes it stops your thinking, which is my favorite place to be.”

“The Lighthouse” is an instance in which this unconventional method did the trick. Pattinson’s performance has already earned him an Independent Spirit Award nomination for lead actor, which in turn brought its share of additional buzz—even the prospect of a dark-horse Oscar nod. And Pattinson has gamely committed to the awards season gauntlet of profiles, media appearances, actor-on-actor interviews, and screening receptions—which is what brings us to this New York studio today.

Robert Pattinson featured on cover of Little White Lies #HighLife Issue

What a fabulous cover and not only do you get to read about Claire Denis and High Life, but there’s a new interview with Rob. The issue is available on general sale from 11 March 2019 or you can subscribe to it HERE. From Little White Lies:

Having edited this august publication for 30 issues, I’ve now lived long enough to realise a long-held dream: create a magazine dedicated to one of the true modern alchemists of cinema, Claire Denis. Her 2000 film Beau Travail acted as a kind of gateway drug, revealing the power, the possibilities and the expressive enchantments of narrative film.
In 2019, she unleashes onto the world a stirring and strange space odyssey called High Life. It’s a journey to the outer edges of the universe, set at a time when humanity is now little more than a walking, talking science experiment. Robert Pattinson, again showing exemplary taste in his choice of collaborators, leads a cast of reprobates who have been saved from a death sentence by giving their bodies over to a mysterious mission being overseen by lascivious sex banshee, Juliette Binoche.

It’s a moving, mind-melting masterwork, which is released into UK cinemas on 10 May. So mark your diaries.

Rob is on the cover of So Film (France) to celebrate the release of #HighLife plus a new interview.  The magazine hits newsstands in France on Friday, 9 November 2018 (and you can purhase HERE, but here’s an extract of what we can expect: 

Interview. How do you go from a vampire romance (Twilight ) to a sensory trip in space with Juliette Binoche? 

As this month High Life comes out , the new Claire Denis, Robert Pattinson pays for his burger at lunchtime ‘in a chic restaurant in London, to talk about a career without downtime, who saw the idol of teenagers turn into an icon on the skin of an auteur cinema as chic as disturbed: Cronenberg, Safdie Brothers, Herzog, James Gray … The kid who skimmed open mic ‘evenings, imitating Bebhe is now a big boy.

Rob seems to have fulfilled both his promises concerning Claire Denis.  I’m very interested to see the critics reactions to Rob’s performance as Monte.

Thanks Sally

New Dior Homme photos of Rob are featured in the new issue of M Le Magazine due Monde (France). Dior Rob looking sharp as always.

Thanks to @Meryl_B_89 for sharing.

Update: Higher quality scans via @sallyvg

Robert Pattinson talks Halloween, New Years and more

Rob talks about spending New Years with friends and his Harry Potter outfit that we posted about HERE.  The full print interview is below.  It seems to me that some of this is new but that it also appears that W Magazine and British Vogue are one and the same ha!  We did hear about WarHammer HERE (and who could forget that). Anyway – here it is.

From W Magazine:

There’s a certain amount of Hollywood cache an actor accrues after starring in a multibillion dollar franchise like the Twilight movies, which brought in over $3.3 billion worldwide over its five-picture run. Robert Pattinson, for one, has spent his creative bankroll interestingly—like making strange, near-experimental movies with David Cronenberg (Cosmopolis, Maps to the Stars) and even playing second fiddle to Guy Pearce and Charlie Hunnam (The Rover and The Lost City of Z, respectively) while also stealing those critically-liked films from the headliners. But at a certain point, a former heartthrob’s “interesting” choices cease to be so interesting the farther he gets away from his heartthrob peak without a second breakthrough role. With 2017’s Good Time, however, Robert Pattinson’s second coming was apparent to everyone who saw the surprise hit. The Safdie brothers-directed heist movie was smart, fun, twisty, and the most propulsive film of the last year—and Pattinson carried the whole show on his shoulders. We always knew he was an interesting guy who liked interesting projects. This performance confirmed all that and more, with Pattinson receiving a nomination for best male lead at the Independent Spirit Awards this year. Here, he reveals to W editor at large Lynn Hirschberg his always unconventional tastes, from an early age on.

Let’s do some fun questions: What was your favorite Halloween costume ever?
I mean I, I can only really remember properly dressing up once, in one of my best friend’s mom’s clothes. She got very upset with me.

So you went as a woman?
Not just as a woman, it was kind of a sort of Charlie Chaplin-ish kind of demon. But I stole lots of my friend’s mom’s clothes from her closet, and she got extremely upset afterwards. But also the next day I remember going back to my apartment and in the courtyard there’s a funeral going on in the morning. [Laughs.] I had to walk back at 9 AM after being up all night dressed as demon old lady clown, and walk into a wake. [Laughs.] I mean, it was pretty incredible.

Did you have fun dressed as a demon old lady clown?
Yeah, I love dressing up. This Halloween I walked into the most extreme, ah, fancy dress party. I was absolutely normcore and it was the most humiliating experience of my life.I didn’t really know that it was probably the most intense costume party in London and I had just come from somewhere else. So, ah, yeah it was very, very embarrassing.

Oh, I’m sure they loved to see you anyway. What was your favorite or most memorable New Year’s?
Probably when I was 18 or 19, I’m trying to remember which one. We went swimming in the ocean at midnight and it was freezing and it was just one of those kind of amazing, calamitous evenings. So we thought we’d lost one of our friends and had to kind of do a search party across the whole island and realized he’d just, um, thought he ran a bath but fell asleep in an empty bath. [Laughs.] And had hypothermia. [Laughs.]

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