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Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in together times
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Jon Stewart tried to bait him with Ben & Jerry’s Karamel Sutra. Good Morning America host George Stephanopoulos offered him Cinnamon Toast Crunch. But maybe French fries would have been a better ploy to get Robert Pattinson to spill some juicy personal details about his breakup with co-star Kristen Stewart.
“Media culture is a monstrous thing,” Pattinson lamented, jamming fries into his mouth between puffs on his electronic cigarette. “You can’t win. The annoying thing is that you can’t attack them, but you can’t defend yourself. The best thing you could possibly do is punch a paparazzi and give them their big payday.”
The 26-year-old actor has run a gauntlet of publicity that was nominally about promoting his new film, Cosmopolis. But the promotional blitz, which also included a New York premiere and other stops, seemed to be as much about proving his emotional resilience in the wake of the tabloid bonanza that exploded after photos surfaced of Stewart in compromising positions with 41-year-old Rupert Sanders, who directed her in Snow White and the Huntsman.
Sitting alongside Pattinson for moral support at the Mandarin Oriental hotel on Columbus Circle was Cosmopolis director David Cronenberg. The Canadian filmmaker, whose challenging arthouse films almost never garner such wide attention, was there as a sort of buffer but also appeared to be quietly amused by the media circus. The actor’s manager would not allow Pattinson to sit alone for an interview with The Times, and even suggested that reporters not ask him about his personal life, or Twilight.
But Twilight, of course, is how Pattinson has become perhaps the most widely recognised young actor of his generation. In the movie franchise, based on Stephenie Meyer’s best-selling young adult novels, he plays a brooding vampire who falls in love with a human girl (Stewart). The film series has grossed over $2.5 billion worldwide since launching in 2008 and will conclude in November with a fifth installment, Breaking Dawn Part II. Pattinson’s off-screen romance with Stewart only stoked the popularity of the vampire movies.
When the Stewart-Sanders affair burst onto the cover of US Weekly in July, it initially seemed like there was little upside for Pattinson. But Stewart’s public apology generated not only sympathy for the man wronged but also a fresh wave of interest for Cosmopolis, which had premiered to mixed response at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
That could help Pattinson as he strives to craft a post-Twilight career. While both of his Twilight co-stars, Stewart and Taylor Lautner, have each taken centre stage in studio pictures, Pattinson has mostly stayed in the indie world. His biggest non-Twilight film to date was last year’s Water for Elephants, a modestly budgeted period romance with Reese Witherspoon that took in a respectable $117 million worldwide. Pattinson’s less-commercial projects, however, have tanked at the box office — the September 11 drama Remember Me only collected $8 million domestically in 2010, and the 19th century-set drama Bel Ami flopped in June, never expanding beyond 15 theatres.
In Cosmopolis, Pattinson plays a young billionaire on the verge of financial ruin who self-destructs over the course of one day, and he has earned some of the best reviews of his career for his performance as the detached whiz-kid.
Cronenberg, who adapted Cosmopolis from Don DeLillo’s book of the same name, said he felt Pattinson was right for the part largely because of his good-looking face, which appears in nearly every frame of the movie. Before casting him, the director watched all of the films the London native has appeared in, and viewed a number of interviews with Pattinson on YouTube to get a better sense of his personality.
“The strength of the Twilight movies is not the acting,” acknowledged Cronenberg. “But it’s not understood that doing Twilight requires presence and professionalism. Are you saying this is an Academy Award performance, or Alec Guinness? That’s a whole other discussion. But you throw somebody on a gruelling set like that — a normal person would be dead in an hour.”
Warming to his own defence, Pattinson interjected: “With this movie people keep saying, ‘Is this gonna be the movie where he can prove he can act?’ It’s like, ‘What do you think I have been doing?’”
“By the way,” Cronenberg added, “he’s a British guy doing an American accent. People don’t realise that there are a lot of very good actors who cannot do accents, and they don’t give Rob credit for that.”
“Oh, give me anything!” Pattinson said with a laugh and taking a drag on his cigarette, which glowed an electronic red with each inhale.
Still, it’s clear Pattinson sometimes questions his acting ability. Before production began on Cosmopolis, he said he was so unsure of his ability to pull off the role that he sat “trembling, absolutely terrified” during the first screen test.
The nerves are somewhat surprising, considering Pattinson’s part in Cosmopolis doesn’t seem all that distant from his own life. Like his character in the film — who remains isolated in a limousine for hours as he slowly traverses Manhattan to get a haircut — Pattinson said that since Twilight opened, he has “had four years of gradually being put more and more into smaller and smaller boxes, and you have a desire to break out.” He’s also a part of the one per cent — according to Forbes, he earned $12.5 million for the last two Twilight pictures — a number he says is “completely not true.”
Pattinson insists he’s terrible with his finances: “The only thing I’m good at with money is blowing it. I don’t even understand [what I spend it on]. I have the exact same lifestyle as when I was 15.”
“Look at the way he dresses,” chimed in Cronenberg, alluding to Pattinson’s informal, almost frat-boy get-up of a polo shirt, jeans and backward cap.
The actor said he feels a pressure to appear “unbearably conservative” because he senses his every move is being scrutinised. He says he’d like for bankers to be hunted by paparazzi and TMZ instead, but knows that’s unrealistic.
“The tabloid industry does terrible, terrible things for the world. It makes people stupid,” he said, his cheeks flushing. “People say [tabloids] are about escapism, and people have got to get away from the misery of the world. It’s like, ‘No, people are lazy, and they don’t want to try.’ … Every time I’ve looked at a magazine like that, I’ve regretted it. I gain absolutely nothing from it. And neither does anyone else.”
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