While Braier expected Pearce to deliver a powerfully non-verbal performance, she had no idea what to make of Pattinson, who sheds movie star glam for his grimiest character turn yet. She hadn’t even seen him in “Twilight.” “But I was just blown away from the first moment I saw him. I think he’s a natural. He’s just born with this quality. There are a lot of actors that have this technical ability. They’ve been working for many years and have learned and refined [their craft]. And Rob has something very instinctive, which is why he’s so famous and loved by girls all over the world.
“He’s a very intelligent person but also very emotional. It’s quite connected. So I think that gives him a gateway to channel whatever character he’s playing from someplace deep. And he came up with backstory about being abused and treated badly. He was always the one in the family that they would bully. And he feels so abandoned. So he’s coming from that psychology where he can fall into this abusive relationship with Guy.
When the franchise that made you famous has made over $1.3 billion at the box office, you’d probably never lower yourself to audition for a role again, right?
Not Robert Pattinson.
To win over Animal Kingdom writer/director David Michôd, RPatz threw any Twilight swagger out the window. “I didn’t know anything about him,” Michôd told us Thursday night at The Rover‘s L.A. premiere. (He said this with a straight face.) “I hadn’t seen any of the Twilight films.”
But Michôd remembered meeting Pattinson and his “really wonderfully awkward physical energy,”which the director thought would be perfect for The Rover, a post-apocalyptic drama, which leaves RPatz caked in dirt and blood as the dim younger brother of a car thief.
Despite the fact that few in Pattinson’s position would continue to test for roles, said Michôd, Pattinson was cool about it:
There were no airs, there was no arrogance, there was no sense of entitlement. Even in terms of testing for me. He knew that he needed to work hard to have the kind of career that he wants.
How did Pattinson, dressed in a natty teal suit, feeling about bringing his Cannes hit to the U.S.? “A bit scary,” said the actor, looking around at the college crowd at Westwood’s Regency Bruin theater waving signs and posters. (Even Zac Efron was there.)
“But we had a really young audience in Australia a few days ago and it was such a bafflingly different reaction. Everybody was like, howling with laughter. And in Cannes you could hear a pin drop the entire time. Crazy. So I have no idea what the reaction’s going to be.”
Forget the vampire of yesteryear. For his next act, Robert Pattinson plays an all-new kind of animal.
Pattinson is one of the two stars of “The Rover,” director David Michôd’s thriller that takes place in the not-too-distant future, ten years after a global economic collapse. Set in the Australian outback, Guy Pearce plays Eric, a violent drifter who cares about only one thing in this desolate world: his car. When his car is hijacked by a bunch of criminals, Eric tracks down one of the thugs’ dim-witted brother, Rey (Pattinson), and drags him along on a quest to reclaim his possession and get some vengeance in the process.
It’s a very different turn for Pattinson, who, up until recently, was best known for his heartthrob role as Edward Cullen in the “Twilight” series. Pattinson has made an active effort to take on radically new roles, what with David Cronenberg’s supremely surreal “Cosmopolis,” and now “The Rover.” Here, Pattinson presents himself without his signature locks, opting instead for a closely-cropped buzz cut. His trademark smile is not a thing of beauty here, thanks to a thick layer of dirt and grime on his teeth. As Rey, Pattinson presents a character who isn’t the brightest bulb in the bunch — but just might be one of the most vulnerable.
“He’s like Bambi,” Pattinson told MTV News. “He’s been really, severely bullied and told that there’s something wrong with him for so long. He’s never been asked the [right] questions or anything. Even when Guy’s character is incredibly abusive, it’s really the first time Rey’s been told to think, and the mechanism of thinking isn’t really there.”
“When [Pearce] asks him, ‘Is that something he told you or something you know?’ He can’t understand the basic question,” he continued, “because no one’s ever asked him that. They just slap him in the head all the time. Their relationship is a bit of a rebirth.”
While Pattinson’s character is a lifelong victim of bullying, Pattinson himself experienced a fairly serene childhood — except for the one time someone stole his shoelaces, when he was twelve years old. How did Pattinson deal with that adversity?
“I killed him,” he joked, before adding with a laugh, “I actually did beat him up, and he was only eight. You have to pick your battles!”
For awhile, it seemed as if the eerily handsome British actor would have an impossible time getting past the iconic Twilight role that first brought him global fame and fortune. The series was too popular. His looks were too vampiric. And no one who plays the same part more than, say, three times ever really shakes it. (See: Connery, Sean.)
But in the years since the final Twilight installment came and went from theaters, Pattinson has begun to accomplish the impossible. Again and again he has chosen to work with brilliant auteurs—Werner Herzog, David Cronenberg, James Gray, Olivier Assayas—and again and again he has stunned audiences with his smart, sensitive, and very un-Cullen-like performances.
Thinking of Rob is not affiliated with Robert Pattinson or his management in any way.
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