{"id":911169,"date":"2026-09-30T15:54:20","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T15:54:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/911169\/"},"modified":"2026-09-30T15:54:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T15:54:20","slug":"robert-pattinson-how-the-primetime-actor-reached-his-prime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/911169\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Pattinson: How the Primetime actor reached his prime."},"content":{"rendered":"

Primetime<\/a>, the new film from A24 and director Lance Oppenheim about the making of To Catch a Predator<\/a>, is a fascinating mess, one in which the whole might be less than the sum of its parts, but the parts are so compelling that you don\u2019t really mind. The fault lies with the film\u2019s screenplay, which mashes together three stories with different protagonists, tones, and thematic concerns. One of these stories is about Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), Predator\u2019s producer, and how, as a woman, she has to fight tooth and claw for the least amount of recognition or respect. Another is about Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), a young actor who has no idea what he\u2019s getting into when he signs on as a \u201cdecoy\u201d luring Predator\u2019s pederasts to their doom. Plum winds up a victim of exploitation himself. He wants to bring joy to the world\u2014his first love is musical theater\u2014but instead lives in the muck, playing a 13-year-old who wants to have sex with middle-aged men. The third is about Chris Hansen, the show\u2019s anchor, played by Robert Pattinson. It\u2019s here that the film\u2019s thematic confusion becomes clearest. Sometimes Dan\u2019s story needs a satanic father figure, and there Hansen is, playing catch with Dan and telling him that he\u2019s a white knight rescuing children. Sometimes Andie\u2019s story needs an egomaniacal misogynist, and there Hansen is again, this time as a narcissist who cannot express gratitude even as she saves him again and again. Finally, there is Hansen\u2019s own story, which is about a man who has already lost his soul trying to get it back by doing good in both his marriage and the world, a tormented Batman in a pressed tan suit, while also pleasing his corporate overlords.<\/p>\n

These Hansens make sense as a coherent character due only to a surprisingly agile and smart turn by Robert Pattinson. At first, it feels as if Pattinson is doing more of an impersonation of Hansen than anything else, but what swiftly becomes clear is that Hansen is, in some bizarre way, doing an impression of himself. One of the film\u2019s best gags is when he gets a call from his wife and answers it with a practiced, authoritative \u201cThis is Chris Hansen,\u201d as if kicking off the nightly news. Hansen is so lost in his performance he doesn\u2019t know how to get back to an authentic self. Pattinson, outspoken in his skepticism of authenticity in real life, lets his freak flag fly, but he also grounds these gambits in a real sense of Hansen\u2019s rage and pain.<\/p>\n

Let me confess something here: I have long had to endure the rolled eyes and come ons of my friends due to my dislike of the work of Robert Douglas Thomas Pattinson. When I would note that his one acting trick appears to be bugging his eyes out, or that his American accent leaves a great deal to be desired, I would be greeted with protests that I was a snob dismissing him due to the Twilight<\/a> films, or that I just wasn\u2019t giving the poor guy a chance because he was too handsome. Shouldn\u2019t one consider his good taste? His risk-taking? His mischievousness in interviews? His willingness, like his ex-co-star and ex-girlfriend Kristen Stewart<\/a>, to use his remarkable good fortune and even better looks to get weird movies made by interesting auteurs?<\/p>\n

The season of repentance for my people (that\u2019d be Jews) recently ended, but let me extend the time of apologies for another couple of weeks and add another mea culpa: My friends were, for the most part, right. Robert Pattinson is a far more interesting artist than I gave him credit for, and far more than a pretty face with an unfortunate tendency to suck in his cheeks. He really does use his good looks and stardom to get interesting movies funded. In the past two decades he\u2019s worked with established auteurs (Bong Joon Ho, Claire Denis, Christopher Nolan, David Cronenberg, James Gray, Lynne Ramsay) and intriguing up-and-comers like Kristoffer Borgli and the Safdies pre\u2013Uncut Gems<\/a>. He\u2019s made blockbusters (The Batman<\/a>, Tenet<\/a>) and smaller films (The Rover<\/a>, The Lighthouse<\/a>). He\u2019s a leading man who often is content with solid supporting turns, including delivering the one memorable line reading<\/a> in this year\u2019s biggest smash. He is something of a box-office Midas as well: This year, Pattinson will be in four hits, between The Drama<\/a>, The Odyssey<\/a>, now Primetime, and the still-to-come Dune: Part Three<\/a>. His production company is currently producing not only Primetime, but The Holes, an off-Broadway play that\u2019s getting rave reviews<\/a>. The people I\u2019ve spoken to who have worked with Pattinson speak highly of his work ethic, creativity, sincere love for film, and kindness. One compared him to 1990s-era Johnny Depp, \u201cbut with a real heart beating underneath.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Robert Pattinson in Primetime (2026).
\nA24<\/p>\n

The comparison is apt, and gets at part of why I resisted his charms for so long. We tend to expect a certain amount of openness and vulnerability from our actors, at least in front of the camera. Being able to reveal a character\u2019s interiority through gesture and subtle facial expression is a hallmark of conventionally good screen acting. We want to feel, particularly when a character is driven to the edge, that the work is personal. That we are seeing an artist put a genuine piece of themselves on the line, and that through this they are helping us to confront the most secret part of ourselves.<\/p>\n

Robert Pattinson is not that kind of actor. He belongs to a parallel tradition, one made up mostly of men, that instead employs opacity to great effect. Think of Robert Redford at his coolest in Three Days of the Condor<\/a>, never doing more than occasionally squinting his eyes, or Brad Pitt, who often seems to have lowered a portcullis to guard his soul. Depp, in films like Public Enemies<\/a> and Donnie Brasco<\/a>, similarly has an ineffable, impenetrable cool. The pioneer of this particular mode was the French actor Alain Delon, who had a self so hardened you could bounce a quarter off it. Delon could not always convincingly deliver lines, but his physical presence and charisma were undeniable.<\/p>\n

One of the unexpected things about the opaque actors is that many of them also have a predilection for eccentric, over-the-top wackiness. Weirdness\u2014especially when executed from an ironic distance from the character\u2014can be its own form of disguise, a stylistic risk that substitutes for the personal risk we usually desire. It signals that we are all in on the joke, even as the joke is on the character. In this shared laughter, the actor somehow escapes, like a New Year\u2019s Eve partygoer making an Irish goodbye<\/a> just before midnight. It is this strain in Pattinson\u2019s work that first led me to underestimate him. Like Pitt in 12 Monkeys or Depp in any number of films, Pattinson has an unfortunate tendency toward mugging that he has not entirely shaken. In the Twilight films, I can\u2019t help but sense that he knows he is acting in garbage, but unlike Michael Sheen, who had the technical chops and mastery of genre to go full Hammer horror in the films, all Pattinson could do was bulge his eyes and blurt each syllable out as if he were being pegged while delivering it. (At times he seems barely able to contain his own laughter<\/a>.) More recently, in Mickey 17<\/a>, his performance was all antics. He condescended to Mickey, and thus invited our condescension, robbing the film of complexity and much-needed soulfulness in the process.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Pattinson in Twilight (2008).
\nSummit Entertainment<\/p>\n

Pattinson\u2019s performative oddity was also richly on display in his press appearances, in which he\u2019s famous for lying, whether as \u201cshtick<\/a>,\u201d because he was a pathological liar<\/a>, or because he was \u201cjust bored<\/a>.\u201d (Here, too, his story keeps changing.) The best thing written about Pattinson remains Taffy Brodesser-Akner\u2019s profile of him for GQ, in which he comes up with ever-odder hijinks for them to do together. Every time Brodesser-Akner agrees to one, he changes his mind, trying to find an even stranger activity to attempt. Thus a suggestion that they do ayahuasca becomes swimming with sharks and escalates to, uh, exchanging fecal matter<\/a> with each other to enrich their gut biomes. Brodesser-Akner comes to realize that the ideas all have one thing in common: \u201cThey all render me incapacitated, unable to ask him any questions, and him unable to answer any.\u201d Later in the profile he says, \u201cI want to be misunderstood.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is all a (mis?)understandable reaction to the intensity of going through the thresher of Hollywood celebrity at the age of 22. It\u2019s also likely that actors like Pitt, Depp, and Pattinson are drawn to oddity because of their impossible handsomeness. It took Brad Pitt a decade or so of making quirkier smaller films before people started to refer to him as \u201ca character actor in a leading man\u2019s body<\/a>,\u201d which might be the highest praise one can give.<\/p>\n

When, for this piece, I looked back again at some of these early offbeat turns in films like The Lost City of Z<\/a> or The Rover, I began to see something else as well. I saw a young man learning to act, in real time, on camera, and in public. Pattinson really is awful in the Twilight films, and not much better in Cosmopolis, the first film he made with a major auteur, in between the final chapters of his vampire franchise. But if in the former he is totally lost trying to make Edward Cullen seem like an actual character, in the latter he is trying something new and stretching himself in unexpected ways. Ditto the various supporting roles he took in small films with limited commercial prospects. The pleasure of watching his work during this period is not to be found in fully successful achievements, but rather in watching someone put the pieces together. If he was not willing to expose some deep and forbidden part of himself, at least he was willing to hazard embarrassment on a very public stage in order to further his craft.<\/p>\n

Somewhere along the way, he also became an adventurous cinephile. Good Time, the movie he made with Benny and Josh Safdie, arose because he sent them a fan note based on a still he had seen from their early film Heaven Knows What<\/a>. A producer on High Life<\/a>, Claire Denis\u2019 film in which he plays a death-row inmate in space, told me that \u201che actively sought out Claire as someone he wanted to work with. \u2026 He really struck us as someone who knew about cinema, cared about it, wanted to be a part of it.\u201d At first, they weren\u2019t sure about meeting with him, an impulse that \u201cseems silly now, but at that period he really wasn\u2019t an actor you felt you could build a film around,\u201d because everyone still thought of him as merely a teen heartthrob. His process on the film was not the dramaturgical script analysis or work on affective memory taught in American acting schools, nor was it the highly technical classical technique of the Brits. Instead, \u201che would basically bring Claire sculptures and photos and other pieces that evoked a feeling. Things you can\u2019t necessarily put into words.\u201d He understood that the film was meant to feel like a dream and had a process to match.<\/p>\n

For me, the film where I really saw that Pattinson had figured it all out, like a tennis player retooling his serve and then suddenly also improving his forehand, was The Drama, Kristoffer Borgli\u2019s poker-faced satire of hypocritical self-righteousness among yuppie millennials. In the film, Pattinson plays Charlie Thompson, a man who learns that his fianc\u00e9e Emma (played by Zendaya, another master of the opaque) once planned (but did not go through with) a school shooting as a teenager. The ensuing questions about whether we can ever know another person slowly drive Charlie mad and threaten to destroy his life. The Drama succeeds because it sits on a tonal knife\u2019s edge, with neither the camera nor the script guiding you as to where your sympathies should lie. Pattinson skillfully vacillates between irony and sincerity, always stepping back inside the character when it is most dangerous and provocative to do so. In a way, this two-step mirrors the audience\u2019s experience of the film. How upset should we be at a monstrous evil someone seriously contemplated but never committed? As this question isn\u2019t answerable, so too is Pattinson\u2019s performance hard to pin down. A more vulnerable and sincere actor would tip the role into a mildly heroic register and wreck the film.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Pattinson in The Drama (2026).
\nA24<\/p>\n

If it took me this long to recognize how good Pattinson can be despite a fascinating and ever-growing filmography, it may be because the films he\u2019s chosen to make with his cineast\u2019s taste and independent spirit are often quite bad. Mickey 17 is Bong Joon Ho\u2019s worst film by far. Good Time is an unwatchable wallow in the gutter, made by filmmakers who do not know how to create stakes without characters making nonsensical decisions<\/a>. The Lost City of Z, James Gray\u2019s take on David Grann\u2019s nonfiction book of the same name, is beautiful but a snooze. Cronenberg\u2019s Cosmopolis<\/a> wears out its welcome fast, and his Maps to the Stars<\/a> is a mess. Robert Eggers\u2019 work leaves me cold, so perhaps I am the wrong person to judge The Lighthouse, but the description, from the friend I saw it with, as \u201cthe most expensive NYU student film I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d has stuck with me over the ensuing years. Tenet is incomprehensible and dull. Lynne Ramsay\u2019s Die My Love<\/a> is played as a dark comedy but burdened by its director\u2019s self-important and overburdened visuals.<\/p>\n

Pattinson is often good in these movies. Tenet, his first collaboration with Christopher Nolan, may be premised on the idea that watching footage go backward is interesting, but Pattinson brings charm and oodles of bonhomie to a bland sidekick role. (At least his Neil, unlike John David Washington\u2019s Protagonist, gets a name.) Like all of the Safdies\u2019 work, Good Time is about an amoral monomaniac whose frantic compulsions wreck everything around them, but Pattinson laces his performance as a small-time hoodlum with grace notes of tenderness for his intellectually disabled brother (played by Benny Safdie). In Die My Love, Pattinson gives a completely committed, wildly embodied performance, matching Jennifer Lawrence at her most delightfully ferocious.<\/p>\n


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Many an actor has tried to escape the burdens of early fame and industry expectations. Few have been as successful at this as Pattinson, who has slipped, Houdini-like, out of constraints that have held back any number of his contemporaries. He\u2019s even somehow managed to play the lead in a comic-book franchise without it totally dominating his career or sandblasting off all his edges. If in his early career, Pattinson could at times try a little too hard to show off those edges, watching him bring his playful instincts and oddball choices into a more naturalistic register is a great pleasure. Pattinson may not always seem invested in confronting us with the deepest truths about ourselves, but he\u2019s more than proved his ability to embody the unease of being alive in our current moment. This feeling of discomfort\u2014of never quite knowing how to fit in, even when you have matinee-idol good looks\u2014is what unites his greatest performances. It\u2019s what makes him so funny, and so chilling, in Primetime, and why he seems on the way to finally earning his first Oscar nomination. It\u2019s hard to imagine another actor finding those same layers as Chris Hansen, but it\u2019s equally hard to imagine that Pattinson would be able to find them absent the very unusual career he\u2019s made for himself. Perhaps his work is, despite his protestations to the contrary, more personal than we\u2019ve been led to believe.<\/p>\n

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