Last week he fended off countless questions about the scandal while making the media rounds to promote “Cosmopolis,” his new film with director David Cronenberg (“A History of Violence,” “Eastern Promises”).
Through it all, he felt the love of his fans. The Twi-hards definitely have been Team Robert.
“I don’t credit that to myself,” Pattinson says. “It’s just that there is something elemental about the ‘Twilight’ books and the movies. The core story has connected to people.
“The fan love from that is kind of amazing. I guess it’s so much better than everyone hating you.”
By now he should have developed an attitude — if only he knew how.
“I want to change. I can’t make myself change. I can’t develop an attitude,” Pattinson says with a goofy giggle that is his trademark.
Adds Cronenberg, “I’ve seen him even try to change and it’s pathetic.”
In “Cosmopolis,” based on the novel by Don DeLillo, Pattinson plays a 28-year-old financial whiz kid and billionaire asset manager whose world is exploding. He gets into his stretch limo to get a haircut from his father’s old barber while wagering his company’s massive fortune on a bet against the Chinese Yuan. His trip across the city becomes a journey as he runs into city riots, various visitors and intimate encounters.
Filming in a limo for so long wasn’t claustrophobic.
“I actually kind of enjoyed it,” he says. “In the beginning, I wanted to stay in the car for the entire day. But it was so unbearably hot. I couldn’t really do this method.
“The car made me really concentrate.”
The London-born actor does an American accent in the movie. “I don’t even know what accent I was doing half of the time,” he admits. “I always found that the dialect was written in the lines.”
This fall, he plays vampire Edward Cullen in “Breaking Dawn — Part 2,” meant to be the final installment of the “Twilight” franchise.
Fans of the series are about to enter the depression zone, and Pattinson offers some words of hope.
“I’m sure they’ll have a ‘Twilight’ TV series spinoff soon. They’ll do it again,” Pattinson says.
Would he ever play Edward Cullen again?
“Who knows?” he says. “The only thing that creates a little bit of a problem is that I’m supposed to be 17 forever.
“I’m not sure I can be 17 forever,” he says with another giggle.
He is excited to see what the future holds for him in Hollywood and elsewhere.
“Life is all about luck,” he says. “Getting to this point was lucky. I just hope that my luck holds out.”
Ask him what he knows about life at this point that he didn’t know when he was younger, and he giggles again.
“I basically have learned that I know absolutely nothing,” he says. “I thought I knew it all. Again, I knew absolutely nothing.”
Once in a while, there are moments when you are watching a film where you feel completely uneasy – not so you’re going to throw up or walk out because you feel disgusted or violated, but where the tension just completely overwhelms you so that you’re grasping whatever you can to get over the unsettling feeling. Imagine that feeling for a whole 108 minutes, and that’s probably the best short description I could give you about nerve-wracking mastermind David Cronenberg’s newest movie “Cosmopolis.”
Thinking of Rob 