CANNES – Having ended his vampire duties, Robert Pattinson is working hard to establish himself as a leading man where his acting skills eclipse his heartthrob status. His new film, COSMOPOLIS, directed by David Cronenberg, is a bold step forward in that direction. Pattinson’s striking features are a perfect match for the film’s eerie plotting that owes just as much to Cronenberg’s macabre vision as it does to the original source material, Don DeLillo’s eponymous novel. Making its world premiere as part of the Cannes Film Festival’s official competition, COSMOPOLIS sees Pattinson play Eric Packer, a Wall Street billionaire whose life undergoes a strange sequence of events against the backdrop of his rapidly collapsing Manhattan universe. Is this how the 26-year-old Pattinson hopes to conquer new audiences? “I didn’t expect to be able to find a project as brilliant as this even though I could spend my life working with directors like Cronenberg,” explains Pattinson. “I have led a charmed life so far as an actor but I’m trying to find as many different and complex roles as possible and being able to work on this film is another gift that I’ve been given. It’s up to me to show what I’m capable of now!” Though his previous film, BEL AMI, failed to catch on at the box office, Pattinson has high hopes that COSMOPOLIS will be the film that redefines his screen persona. Pattinson was joined at Cannes by his equally famous girlfriend and TWILIGHT co-star, Kristen Stewart, although they typically avoided appearing together even though Stewart has repeatedly “outed” their relationship and Pattinson has similarly admitted their love affair and commitment to each other. In conversation, Pattinson is exceedingly polite and responsive and utterly indifferent to his celebrity status. One gets the impression he would be just as happy if COSMOPOLIS was his first film and audiences would get to know him afresh.
Q: Rob, your role in Cosmopolis is very different from anything we’ve seen you in before. How would you describe your character, Eric Packer?
PATTINSON: He exists in his own, separate reality in a way and in the course of the film he’s trying to discover something about the world he’s really living in and how he can adapt to it. Packer lives in this complex financial universe which is guided by trading algorithms and he plays the game which is dictated by those laws which are their own distinct reality. That’s his central dilemma. He’s dealing with financial data that is constantly projecting him into the future and he doesn’t know what it’s like to live in the present. Packer has become so disconnected from the world that it’s made it difficult for him to understand what the world is really like. I’m sorry if that sounds very metaphysical but that’s how the story unfolds.
Thinking of Rob 