{"id":619889,"date":"2026-09-10T01:46:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T01:46:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/619889\/"},"modified":"2026-09-10T01:46:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T01:46:15","slug":"robert-pattinson-on-primetime-nerves-chris-hansen-and-fame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/619889\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Pattinson on Primetime Nerves, Chris Hansen and Fame"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cPrimetime\u201d received a hero\u2019s welcome at the Venice Film Festival \u2014 but in the hours before Saturday\u2019s world premiere, Robert Pattinson was a wreck.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was genuinely throwing up, thinking, this is a huge mistake,\u201d he said, laughing. \u201cBut that\u2019s also part of the fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pattinson clearly had a blast playing \u201cTo Catch a Predator\u201d host Chris Hansen, crafting a media monster driven in equal parts by envy and ambition \u2014 and taking even greater pleasure in shading the character with eccentric flourishes. (\u201cAny challenger coming for the Weirdo crown had best lay down arms by the time Pattinson responds to a more respected journalist\u2019s passive-aggressive slight by somehow making 17 unique faces in under three seconds,\u201d TheWrap wrote in its review<\/a>.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

But he also knew that taking on such an uncompromising character, in such an audacious film, was a risk. The role frightened Pattinson, who couldn\u2019t shake the feeling that \u201cthis might be a mistake.\u201d That only strengthened his resolve.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cPart of me knows it\u2019s high risk, high reward,\u201d he explained during a roundtable interview at the Venice Film Festival. \u201cBeing nervous about something is great, and the annoying thing is that when you want something that excites you, it\u2019s exciting when you\u2019re at home just imagining the risk. Then one day the risk actually arrives, and it\u2019s really scary.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Robert\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

The actor was considerably more relaxed in the days following the film\u2019s successful launch; he even lingered in Venice, holding court at the Danieli hotel while \u201cPrimetime\u201d<\/a> director Lance Oppenheim was off preparing for another splash at Telluride.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The actor and director stayed in constant conversation as they dreamed up \u201cPrimetime,\u201d and both had something to prove. Coming from documentary, Oppenheim suddenly had a megawatt cast and a far bigger budget to play with. Coming from movie stardom, Pattinson found himself in an entirely new kind of working relationship \u2014 one that began years before the camera ever rolled.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was probably the biggest amount of work I\u2019ve done,\u201d Pattinson says. \u201cBecause it was my first time producing, very few people would put up with the number of phone calls I made. Lance\u2019s wife had a baby three days before we started shooting, and we were on FaceTime while he was sitting in the doorway of the delivery room \u2014 his wife was literally in labor, and he was half there. She told him, \u2018Give me two more minutes!\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Producing, he explains, gave him a sharper sense of ownership. \u201cEverything starts feeding into everything else. You start to feel like more of a part of the industry as a whole, rather than just waiting for your agent to call. That\u2019s nice.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"RobertRobert Pattinson in \u201cPrimetime\u201d (A24)<\/p>\n

He\u2019ll keep at it \u2014 if only to guarantee himself more work.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAs soon as I hit my 40th birthday, I thought, I can never stop working again until retirement,\u201d he laughs. \u201cYou can\u2019t do this job without the opportunities, and I\u2019m a big believer that if the opportunity is there, you have to take it \u2014 you build your life around it, otherwise what else are you going to do, go on vacation? That\u2019s the strange thing about being an actor: you\u2019re either doing acting jobs or doing nothing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Maybe so. But as a movie star, promotion is also part of the job. And oddly enough, that particular obligation helped Pattinson make sense of the \u201cTo Catch a Predator\u201d phenomenon.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause the show became such a big hit, it became subject to the same laws of the entertainment industry as everything else,\u201d he explains. \u201cSo I love those interviews where Chris [Hansen] went on Conan O\u2019Brien, having to sell the show to a late-night audience who just wants to laugh, while talking about the most serious thing possible. Watching him try to walk that line \u2014 wanting people to watch the show without denigrating what he was actually doing \u2014 you\u2019re stuck in this netherworld. Even Conan, when it got too serious, would tell a joke, and if Chris didn\u2019t go along with it, it got weird.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI found that fascinating \u2014 and I related to it on a pretty personal level, too.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

As a producer \u2014 playing a more hands-on creative role alongside Oppenheim and screenwriter Ajon Singh \u2014 Pattinson may have found in \u201cTo Catch a Predator\u201d a way to explore his own broader feelings, and misgivings, about showbiz.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Chris\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you watch the first episode, it\u2019s really just addressing a serious issue and warning people about what\u2019s happening,\u201d he says. \u201cYou weren\u2019t initially going for ratings, but once you\u2019re repeating the same format over and over \u2014 and Dateline had never done that with any other show \u2014 you\u2019re clearly doing it for the audience. By the 18th time, you\u2019ve already told everyone what to look out for. It\u2019s no longer about warning anybody about anything.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s an indictment of anyone,\u201d he continues. \u201cIt\u2019s just that sometimes you inevitably get molded by the audience\u2019s desires, and sometimes the audience can just turn on you, even after you\u2019ve been trying to please them. All of that is pretty interesting to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, he\u2019d rather keep you guessing, betting on riskier films while seasoning blockbusters like \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d<\/a> with unexpected (and meme-ready) performance choices.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019d be very good at straight comedy,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s more fun to [make the audience laugh in scenes] when it\u2019s not supposed to be funny.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

He might even display more candor than the famously impish interviewee is known for. Or, at least, he puts on a good show.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWith \u2018Primetime,\u2019 we were trying to make something that isn\u2019t didactic,\u201d he says. \u201cTrying not to judge the ethics of the show, but to sit with the dilemma of having a successful show and becoming a star, and how you navigate that when the stakes are extremely high.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

He adds: \u201cIf you find an audience and want to keep them, you have to change.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Robert\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cPrimetime\u201d received a hero\u2019s welcome at the Venice Film Festival \u2014 but in the hours before Saturday\u2019s world…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":619890,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,202897,93,61,60,202899,16180,802],"class_list":["post-619889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-chris-hansen","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-primetime","tag-robert-pattinson","tag-venice-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619889\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/619890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}