Few things in life are as nerve-wracking as auditioning for a movie role. Even for Robert Pattinson, one of the most successful and popular actors in the world, auditioning for a role can be an almost unbearably stressful experience. To get the lead role in The Rover, for instance, Pattinson had to audition in front of director David Michod (Animal Kingdom), and by his own estimation, the audition did not go well.
“I’m so bad at auditioning, and I was terrified that I wasn’t going to get it,” Pattinson tells ET Canada exclusively. “I really, really fought for it.”
What made Pattinson—an actor with no shortage of scripts coming his way—fight so hard for this particular role? As Pattinson explained, the role of Reynolds (a naive, simple-minded drifter) was simply too good to pass up.
“It’s a character that doesn’t really have any constraints,” he said. “It’s not really specified where he’s from or what his desires are or even his mental state and I felt really relaxed doing it because you could just do whatever you wanted, basically.”
Unlike during his audition, Pattinson was completely at ease playing the character during filming—an experience which the Twilight star says was a first. “It felt for a second that I knew what I was doing because I just sort of fell into acting and I never really felt like that before,” he said.
The 41-year-old filmmaker had worked with Pearce in “Animal Kingdom” and both he and Joel Edgerton, who received a shared story-by credit, created Eric with him in mind. Pattinson, on the other hand, was a different story. Michôd had a general meeting with the actor before he “The Rover” became his follow-up and says he just immediately liked him.
“I found him really beguiling and I loved his physical energy, and he was smart and had a wonderfully open face,” Michôd recalls. “When it came time to start testing for the character, I knew I wanted to see him, but yeah, I didn’t know what he was capable of. I think he knew that people didn’t know what he was capable of as well and so he was very willing to work and work hard. But very quickly when he came in to test for me I could just see this skill set that he just hasn’t been able to showcase.”
Those instincts paid off. Pattinson’s work is clearly the best of his career as he makes sure the slightly “off” Rey isn’t just Pattinson playing the big screen “Robert Pattinson.” Many audiences, however, will be surprised to find the Brit is playing an American in this setting. Obvious box office benefits to having American characters aside, Michôd says it was more important that “The Rover” felt vaguely international.
“I felt like [a few Americans] would assist in creating this world that suggested a kind of global economic meltdown, if suddenly people were just moving everywhere or doing what people had done for centuries,” Michôd says. “If you think about the Australian gold and American gold rushes of the 19th Century, there were people from all over the world, people from China and Europe, every corner coming to strange corners of the planet to try and eke out a living pretty desperately.”
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