The Wild Career Arc of Robert Pattinson
Robert Pattinson has been an A-lister practically since the day he started appearing in films, but when he appeared in Christopher Nolan’s 2020 time-travel action film Tenet, it was the first big-budget studio production he had acted in since hanging up his vampire fangs with The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 eight years earlier. It’s not like he wasn’t busy, as he had new films (often more than one) released every year during the interim. It’s also not like studios weren’t still calling him as, beyond Twilight, he had also appeared in the book adaptation Water for Elephants in 2011 and the drama Remember Me in 2010 and turned both into sizable hits.
Instead, for almost a full decade and beyond, Pattinson used his status as an A-list star with a dedicated fanbase to fulfill the old Hollywood axiom of “One for you, one for me.” Playing Edward Cullen in the Twilight series earned him enough earning power for investors to feel comfortable putting money behind any movie with Robert Pattinson as the star, and he turned this clout into a blank check for a number of great auteurs and indie filmmakers, helping get projects off the ground and achieve mass distribution they may not have otherwise received.
Then, ever since 2020, Pattinson seems to have returned to big-budget studio filmmaking, but entirely on his own terms. Below are some highlights from the last 15 years of Pattinson’s very idiosyncratic career and ideas about what lies ahead in his future.
Cronenberg Calling: Cosmopolis and Maps to the Stars
In 2011, at the height of fangirl adoration and online mockery for his role in the Twilight series, David Cronenberg cast Robert Pattinson as the lead role in his sleek drama about a billionaire in crisis, Cosmopolis. Pattinson was originally a last-minute replacement for Colin Farrell, who had scheduling conflicts with the production and was unable to move forward, but the move proved fortuitous as the film ended up being Pattinson’s first foray into art-house filmmaking. Despite having a passion for the more independent, auteur-driven side of cinema, Pattinson never considered himself good or worthy enough to act in such projects, and getting the chance to work with Cronenberg and having a film he starred in premiere at Cannes gave him the confidence of where to take his career next. And despite the film receiving polarizing reviews, Cronenberg liked working with Pattinson enough to cast him in his next film, Maps to the Stars.
Foreign Auteurs: The Rover, Queen of the Desert, and High Life
Once the Twilight hype had died down, Pattinson’s next role came not from Hollywood (or even from Pattinson’s native England), but from the Australian filmmaker David Michôd and his 2014 dystopian western film The Rover. Trying to avoid being typecast, he fought hard to be in the rugged, violent film and received much acclaim for his film, although audiences used to seeing him as Edward hadn’t yet realized that his career had taken a decisive turn. The following year, legendary German director Werner Herzog cast him in a small but pivotal role as T.E. Lawrence in his biopic about Gertrude Bell, Queen of the Desert. The film did not receive much acclaim, but Pattinson and the cast were praised for their work, and Herzog likely was the most legendary director Pattinson had worked with to that date.
But these early roles had mostly been supporting parts, building up enough of Pattinson’s bona fides to prove that he was a serious, legitimate actor. In 2018, he got his chance to star in a major film from an acclaimed foreign auteur with Claire Denis’s High Life. The film features Pattinson leading a cast that also includes Juliette Binoche, Mia Goth, and André Benjamin - all of whom are criminals sentenced to death row sent on an intergalactic voyage to extract alternative energy from a black hole. The film was confounding, challenging, and did not conform to any audience expectations about what a sci-fi film should look like, but it was also visually stunning and represented one of the most audacious performances of Pattinson’s career to date.
American Independents: Safdie, Gray, Corbet, Eggers
While taking the time to work with a number of highly-respected auteurs who had already achieved their legendary status, Pattinson still had enough cache at the box office and among the critical establishment to help a number of American indie directors achieve their biggest visions to date. In 2015, fresh off the Herzog film and Anton Corbjn’s Life, he played a role in Brady Corbet’s debut feature film, The Childhood of a Leader. While Pattinson was not the lead, he was by far the biggest star of the whole cast (which also included Bérénice Bejo and Liam Cunningham), and likely had a sizable impact on first-time director Corbet receiving a $5 million budget for the film. He followed that up the same year with a supporting role in James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, a jungle epic that looks far more expensive and big than its midscale budget would imply.
Perhaps the biggest success of this period, though, was when Pattinson expressed an interest in working with Josh and Benny Safdie on their next film. At that point, the Safdies’ biggest film was a 2014 drama about homeless heroin addicts on the streets of New York City named Heaven Knows What. The film received a small distribution from a subdivision of The Weinstein Company, but it still caught the eye of Pattinson, who wanted to be included in the Safdies’ next project no matter what it was. This led to their work on the film Good Time, a nail-biting thriller about a criminal and the 24 hours he spends trying to get his mentally-disabled brother out of jail. The film was a huge critical success, the biggest financial success the Safdies had to date, and paved the way for their future hit Uncut Gems.
In 2019, Pattinson co-starred in the second film from American filmmaker Robert Eggers, fresh off the success of his debut feature The Witch. This was one of the most challenging roles of his to date: A chamber drama with him sparring off Willem Dafoe as lighthouse keepers living alone on an island as they both slowly lose their minds. If Pattinson had not already brushed off his Twilight fame, then certainly his role as Ephraim Winslow would do it. He plays Ephraim as paranoid, delusional, angry, violent, and driven by disturbed sexual desires, and received possibly the most acclaim of his career yet, and the film was a huge financial success for an artsy, black-and-white film and even received an Oscar nomination for Best Cinematography.
Back to the Majors: Christopher Nolan, Batman, and Bong
After this decade of working in the independent art-house circuit, Pattinson made a big return to Hollywood studios in the 2020s, but this time entirely on his own terms. The aforementioned Tenet was already Pattinson’s biggest film since the Twilight saga, but even in 2019, he already announced that he was making a return to big-budget studio filmmaking by starring as Bruce Wayne in Matt Reeves’s reimagining of the Caped Crusader in The Batman. Obviously, Pattinson was still a big name draw for a number of viewers, but Reeves had actually written the role with Pattinson in mind after seeing his performance in Good Time. Clearly, his decade of working in the indies had won him a lot of fans in the industry and convinced others that his acting was some of the best in the industry.
The Batman was a huge success and the most acclaimed Batman film since Nolan’s The Dark Knight in 2008. Robert Pattinson was clearly back in Hollywood in a big way, but beyond sequel talks, he decided that he wanted to use his time wisely and devote his attention to a few big projects at a time. Outside of a lead role in the English dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, his role in Bong Joon-ho’s new English-language film Mickey 17 is the first time we’ve seen him on the big screen since Batman. And it’s clear that, even though he’s making big-budget movies again, he still wants to work with the best directors in the business, from Reeves making his big jump from Planet of the Apes to the D.C. universe to Bong Joon-ho making his long-awaited follow-up to Parasite.
Looking at what he has coming up, it’s clear that Pattinson is approaching big movies and fame on his own terms. He’s acting in Christopher Nolan’s big-budget take on Homer’s The Odyssey, but he’s also working with Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay on her next film after the acclaimed You Were Never Really Here and up-and-coming director Kristoffer Borgli (fresh off Dream Scenario) on a film called The Drama, also starring Zendaya. Even though he’s back in the majors, Pattinson remains one of the most exciting actors working today. When you see a film starring him these days, you can be guaranteed that you haven’t seen anything else like it, and there are few stars like that working today.