Yahoo Movies Mickey 17's Robert Pattinson has escaped Twilight's shadow by being weird
Ahead of his anarchic performance in Mickey 17, we look back at some of Robert Pattinson's strangest roles, including The Lighthouse and The King.
It would've been very easy for Robert Pattinson to play it safe with his career. He broke out as Hogwarts pretty boy Cedric Diggory in the fourth Harry Potter movie, then scored the most significant teen heartthrob role of the 2000s as the Twilight saga's dashing vampire Edward Cullen. Since then, though, he's been refreshingly and enjoyably weird in his movie choices.
Pattinson hasn't entirely resisted the call of the blockbuster, of course, taking on a superhero role in the 2022 movie The Batman — one of the best DC adaptations ever. He also deployed his old charisma to great effect as the secretive agent Neil in Christopher Nolan's time-bending thriller Tenet. But neither of those is the reason Pattinson is one of Hollywood's most fascinating actors.
Our first clue to Pattinson's ever-weirder oeuvre came six months before the final Twilight movie premiered. At the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, audiences got their first glimpse of David Cronenberg's slick drama Cosmopolis, in which Pattinson played a billionaire travelling very slowly across New York City in a limousine.
That film works as a commentary on Pattinson's own stardom. His character exists in a sealed-off world where millions of dollars in currency fluctuation don't even affect him. He's a man worn down by the monotony of glamour. Two years later, Pattinson played with some of the same themes in the pitch-black Tinseltown satire Maps to the Stars — his reunion with Cronenberg.
In the next few years, Pattinson worked with some fascinating filmmakers in Claire Denis, James Gray, and Brady Corbet. He also starred in the Safdie brothers' intense thriller Good Time, existing in a heightened and paranoid world of high anxiety and stress. Without Pattinson's face on the poster, that film would not have reached as many people as it eventually did.
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This period of Pattinson's career stands as his "auteur era", where he pursued complex roles with fascinating filmmakers. What was to come, though, was his era of pure weirdness. This started in 2019 with director Robert Eggers and his nightmarish monochrome story The Lighthouse. "I said to Robert that 'I only want to do strange things'," said Pattinson in a 2022 interview with GQ. The director certainly delivered — and then some.
As the newbie lighthouse keeper Ephraim Winslow, Pattinson is inscrutable and fascinating. The movie eschews traditional notions of plot as it traps the audience within Winslow's increasingly fracturing sanity. Alongside a devilish Willem Dafoe performance, Pattinson descends convincingly into madness en route to one of the most unforgettable final images in recent cinema.
The same year, Pattinson gave one of his strangest performances in Timothée Chalamet-starring The King. In that movie, Pattinson plays the Dauphin of France — complete with utterly ludicrous accent. In an otherwise quite serious film, Pattinson cranks up the camp. It's a performance that makes very little sense in the context of the movie, but that doesn't stop it being joyous fun.
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Pattinson was on similarly over-cranked form in Netflix thriller The Devil All the Time the following year, in which he plays the absurdly named and even more absurdly accented preacher Preston Teagardin. The truly loathsome, slimy Teagardin is one of Pattinson's most overtly villainous characters — played as if he is literally contorting his famously handsome face into something grotesque.
The double whammy of Tenet and The Batman appeared to mark Pattinson's move out of his weird, experimental phase. For the first time in a decade, Pattinson took on blockbuster roles and used his handsomeness and charisma at face value, rather than as something twisted. But, of course, that's not to say that he was prepared to ditch weirdness forever.
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In 2023, he appeared in the English dub of Hayao Miyazaki's animated fantasy The Boy and the Heron, providing the voice of the titular bird. Though Pattinson's performance is, of course, inspired by the work of original Japanese voice actor Masaki Suda, it's a mark of how chameleonic Pattinson has become as a performer — as well as his willingness to take on bizarre challenges of all kinds.
That has now led Pattinson to Mickey 17 — director Bong Joon-ho's massively anticipated follow-up to the Oscar-winning modern classic Parasite. In the movie, Pattinson plays an "expendable" employee on an off-Earth colony. He takes on dangerous tasks that he likely won't survive, with a clone stepping up to take over each time he dies.
The trailers make it very clear that this isn't a serious tale and is instead the sort of anarchic comedy that Pattinson's era of weirdness seems tailor-made for. Much like his former Harry Potter co-star Daniel Radcliffe, Pattinson has discovered that embracing chaos is the way to escape the shadow of a dominant role before it subsumes your entire career.
The early reviews for Mickey 17 have been very positive and, if there's any justice, this will fire the starting pistol on another weirdo phase for Robert Pattinson's career. We have a lot of affection for Twilight and The Batman was great fun, but Pattinson is at his best when he's just being really very strange indeed.
Mickey 17 is in UK cinemas from 7 March.
