Thinking of Rob   It's all about Robert Pattinson

The chiselled Brit teen idol tells LWLies about his work on The Rover and his swift transformation into an actor who’s always up for a challenge.

Robert Pattinson’s star power still burns across the globe but all he wants to do with it is make interesting art house movies. David Michôd’s The Rover fits that bill. Pattinson stars opposite Guy Pearce as a splash of humanity in a violent vision of post-apocalyptic Australia. We spoke to him at the Cannes Film Festival, where he also had David Cronenberg’s Maps To the Stars on the docket.

LWLies: David Michôd has said that there’s a very angry man – aka him – at the heart of The Rover. What emotions did you draw from for it and what emotions do you think it conjures?
Pattinson: It definitely conjures a lot of dread and anxiety but it was the character I was reading from. Also the first thing I connected to was purely a stylistic thing. Clean writing and also having it so stark. It was so original, even the way it looked on the page.

What did you find interesting about Rey when he first came into your life?
I thought it was quite interesting to read something where you actually can’t tell if the guy’s mentally handicapped or not. I asked David at the beginning in the auditions whether he was or not and he was like, ‘I don’t know. Maybe’ and then we established that he was someone who has just been really severely bullied or someone that has been told that he’s mentally handicapped his whole life but it’s more to do with confidence. He’s really shy and people around him, his family, are really rough and have been slapping him around his whole life and so he’s decided that he can’t be his own person. He’s never even attempted to think for himself or speak for himself or anything. It was interesting, the only time when he is his own person is when a horrible man forces him into it.

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