Robert Pattinson King of Clickbait calls Twilight AN “Arthouse movie”

Nicholas Barber of BBC Culture spoke with Rob about his career on the eve of The Lighthouse being released in the UK. Below is an extract, but you can read the full interview by clicking on the link above:

“I literally started this year with no job,” he says, referring to 2019. “I remember my agent saying, ‘You’re not really on anybody’s list. The movies are well reviewed, but they aren’t big hits.’ And then a week later I got another call out of the blue: ‘Do you want to be in a Chris Nolan movie?’ I was like: ‘Wait – how did that happen?

As well as featuring in Christopher Nolan’s time-twisting thriller, Tenet, which is released in July, Pattinson is squeezing into the bat suit vacated by Ben Affleck to star in Matt Reeves’ The Batman. But he maintains that he is not plunging into the Hollywood mainstream. Nolan, he argues, is an indie auteur who just happens to have colossal budgets at his disposal, and Batman is one of the “crazy and perverse” characters he usually plays. “Out of all the big roles that I knew of in that kind of realm,” he muses, “there was just something about this one.”

Maybe Pattinson can teach us all a lesson about having the courage of our convictions. By sticking to his own niche taste in films, he gets to be one of the saviours of arthouse cinema – and yet he gets to flirt with blockbusters and be the saviour of Gotham City, too. Who else has a career like his? The only actor who springs to mind, strangely enough, is Pattinson’s Twilight co-star and ex-girlfriend, Kristen Stewart. He grins so widely at this comparison that his eyes crinkle up and disappear. “That’s because no one realised that Twilight was an arthouse movie. It’s part of the same thing. In a few years, people will suddenly realise – ah, it was arthouse! I totally missed it!”