Though it was the Twilight films that first really put him on the map and made him the envy of almost every girl on the planet, Robert Pattinson is much more than just a pretty face. Ever since his time as Edward Cullen came to an end, he’s been testing his acting chops in a bunch of challenging and interesting roles. The actor’s latest is David Michôd’s The Rover, which hit theatres in limited release on Friday and is expanding this week.
The film takes place in Australia, 10 years after the global economy has collapsed, and stars Guy Pearce as Eric, a man out for revenge after being carjacked by a ruthless gang. He soon crosses paths with a damaged young man named Ray (Pattinson), whose brother, Henry, is the leader of the gang that stole is car and left him for dead after a botched robbery. Together, the two travel through the Australian outback to find Henry and take revenge. There’s a lot more going on beneath the surface of this intriguing and thought-provoking film, but that’s the gist of it.
Last week in Los Angeles, I had the chance to sit down for an exclusive interview with Michôd, Pattinson and Pearce while they were at the Four Seasons Hotel promoting The Rover. We discussed the complex relationship between Pattinson and Pearce’s characters, Pattinson’s physical transformation, some of the deeper messages of the film and more.
Be sure to catch The Rover this week in theatres if you haven’t done so already!
With all the great photo’s coming out and the huge amount, there are a few that left us giggling and coming up with weird/funny/crazy stuff Rob might be thinking / saying in them. We shared some of them on twitter earlier under #BadCaptionRob and will be sharing more in the future: All in good fun (and promo time might be making us slightly crazy) 😉
Speaking with David Michôd, he intended the scene to be a reminder of the kind of life Rey would have had in other circumstances, one that included more pop songs than acts of revenge.
But as important as the choice of “Pretty Girl Rock” was to Michôd (a guilty pleasure of his), it wasn’t the only option. “We went into the shoot knowing that that was the song that we were going to use. One thing that did happen was when we were rehearsing the shot, Rob was sitting in the car singing some really beautiful Southern gospel type thing,” Michôd said. “I remember going up to him at a certain point during camera rehearsals and said ‘What is that you’re singing?’ He said, ‘I don’t know. It’s something I’ve just made up.’ We did a few takes of him singing this thing. It was really beautiful.”
Michôd ended up deciding against Pattinson’s improvised gospel song, but only because of how much he liked the Hilson song, which he interpreted as having a darker meaning than the poppy hook might let on.
“There was something about that one that I really like, in part because it’s not only very poppy but also it’s one of those songs that — as so many great pop songs do — has a strange, dark undercurrent.”
In The Rover’s bleak universe, there is virtually no backstory — illustrative of a world in which nothing really matters — and we know little about Robert Pattinson’s Rey other than that he and his older brother (Scoot McNairy) are in a small band of thugs who were violently thwarted during a criminal act we don’t see. An injured Rey has been abandoned for expedience’s sake, which is how he becomes a hostage to Eric (Guy Pearce), whose car has been stolen by Rey’s former friends. (Eric really wants that car back, for a reason that is revealed only in the movie’s final moments.) As Rey, Pattinson plays a “half-wit,” as Eric calls him, a far cry from Twilight’s Edward Cullen, the emo vampire who served as a tweenage fantasy.
The Rover is David Michôd’s second feature as a director, following up on 2010’s lauded, provocative Animal Kingdom. And though it takes place in Australia, where Michôd is from, Rey and his brother inexplicably have American Southern accents. It’s good for Pattinson to sound nothing like Edward, the character that made him famous. Rey starts out fearful — in one scene he folds himself into a fetal position. But he also changes as the movie goes on (to describe would be to spoil). In Variety, Scott Foundas called it a “career-redefining performance” for Pattinson.
In an interview with BuzzFeed this week in Beverly Hills, Pattinson discussed The Rover (which premiered at Cannes last month and comes out in New York and Los Angeles this weekend, and will be released nationally next Friday), and his post-Twilight career. And he has been working a lot: In addition to David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, which also premiered at Cannes, he will soon appear in Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert, Anton Corbijn’s Life, and Olivier Assayas’ Idol’s Eye with Robert De Niro, which has not yet begun filming. As someone who tripped into huge stardom after he was cast in Twilight, and then fell into a viper’s nest of paparazzi as one-half of a tabloid couple while he dated his co-star Kristen Stewart, Pattinson, now 28, described life after Edward as a “process.”
He has now lived a good portion of his life hunted, both by paps and fans, but in person, he is neither brooding nor tortured. Actually, he was quick to laugh. And he seems to have figured out how to live a sane life, if not a normal one.
Thinking of Rob is not affiliated with Robert Pattinson or his management in any way.
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In The Rover’s bleak universe, there is virtually no backstory — illustrative of a world in which nothing really matters — and we know little about Robert Pattinson’s Rey other than that he and his older brother (Scoot McNairy) are in a small band of thugs who were violently thwarted during a criminal act we don’t see. An injured Rey has been abandoned for expedience’s sake, which is how he becomes a hostage to Eric (Guy Pearce), whose car has been stolen by Rey’s former friends. (Eric really wants that car back, for a reason that is revealed only in the movie’s final moments.) As Rey, Pattinson plays a “half-wit,” as Eric calls him, a far cry from Twilight’s Edward Cullen, the emo vampire who served as a tweenage fantasy.
Thinking of Rob 