Robert Pattinson’s most ridiculous tall tales: “What on earth? Are you possessed?”
Robert Pattinson has become well-versed in press interviews. So much so that, after years on the press circuit with blockbusters like the Twilight Saga and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the actor has found a way to entertain himself and get through the cumbersome process by dropping in completely fabricated, absurd and surreal anecdotes.
From his iconic Metro interview involving everything from his stalker to his lack of hairwashing, Robert Pattinson has since revealed he has found lying to be the best way to pass the time during media duties, telling the New York Times last year that he used to become bored while sitting for them early on in his career.
“The only thing people would ever ask me about was being famous,” he said, “You go into, like, a fugue state”. The result is a swirling rumour mill of unhinged stories about the actor, some of which have been easier to come back from than others.
Coming in at the top, and perhaps most outlandish, is Pattinson’s recounting of a dinner he had with a stalker fan in Spain who had been waiting outside of his apartment for days. He told late-night host David Letterman in 2009 that he had asked the fan if she had wanted to join him for dinner, explaining, “I was so chronically bored that one day, she’d been out there for about three weeks, and I said, ‘Hey, do you just want to go to dinner or something? I mean, no one else wants to hang out with me’.”
He explained that she took him to her parents’ restaurant, where he “complained about everything in my life” before she passed him the bill.
In close second place in the lie absurdity scale is the self-made rumour that Pattinson never washed his hair. In an interview with Movie Maker, he addressed a lie he had concocted years ago about not washing his hair for years and years.
Pattinson told Extra that he “didn’t really see the point in washing your hair”, back in 2009, noting, “It’s like, I don’t clean my apartment ’cause I don’t care. I have my apartment for sleeping in, and I have my hair for just, you know, hanging out on my head. I don’t care if it’s clean or not.”
And then, more than ten years ago, on the tail end of Twilight mania, when asked how long it took to get his “hair perfectly coiffed”, he told Chicago Tribune, “I have so much residue crap in my hair from years and years and years of not washing it and not having any sense of personal hygiene whatsoever”.
Comparing the fabrication to another story he had made up at the time, Pattinson also told MovieMaker, “It’s the same thing as saying in an interview when I was like 21 that I didn’t wash my hair. It just sticks for 15 years”.
If you’re wondering what that comparison is, it involves the earlier 2020 interview for GQ, in which the actor said he wasn’t really working out for his role as Batman, or following in the footsteps of Christian Bale, who reportedly trained six times a week, often for three hours at a time.
“I think if you’re working out all the time, you’re part of the problem,” he said, referring to other actors. “You set a precedent. No one was doing this in the ’70s. Even James Dean—he wasn’t exactly ripped”. He later clarified that it was a joke. “That really came back to haunt me,” he revealed, “I just always think it’s really embarrassing to talk about how you’re working out”.
An equal amount of absurdity is Pattinson’s completely fabricated traumatic story of seeing a clown die on a past trip to the circus with his family. While promoting Water for Elephants back in 2011, Pattinson told Matt Lauer, appearing on the Today show, “[The clown’s] little car exploded—the joke car exploded on him. Yeah, seriously… My parents had to, like…everyone ran out. It was terrifying…. The only time I’ve ever been to a circus.”
In a recent interview with The New York Times, the actor said he recently watched back the interview and was surprised by what he saw. “There was absolutely no hesitation at all,” he said about the fib, “I’m like, ‘What on earth? Are you possessed?’”
According to Image magazine, there’s other lies too: that he used to be a hand model, that he was a drug dealer in high school who imported substances in floppy discs, that he was expelled from his first prep school for “peddling porn”, and that he’s a fake furniture designer who makes tiny chairs out of clay, takes pictures of them, and sends them to a designer who helps builds them.
Ultimately, it’s not clear where Pattinson draws the line when it comes to public honesty, but there’s one anecdote involving a pasta-based business idea that, despite its weirdness, he does insist is true. In the interview with GQ from 2020, he explained his vision for “hand-held pasta”, asking what if “pasta really had the same kind of fast-food credentials as burgers and pizzas?”
“I was trying to figure out how to capitalise in this area of the market, and I was trying to think: How do you make a pasta which you can hold in your hand?” he relayed. He said he designed a prototype of this handheld pasta and even set up a meeting with restaurateur Lele Massimini about his “business plan”.
A few years later, however, in another interview with the magazine, known for its accompanying iconic ’90s Joker-esque photoshoot courtesy of photographer Jack Bridgland and director Gina Manning, Pattinson doubled down, explaining, “I was fully, actually trying to make that pasta. Like I was literally in talks with frozen-food factories, and hoped that that article would be the proof of concept”.
With his latest press tour for Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love, in which he stars alongside Jennifer Lawrence, who’s also known for her cheeky demeanour in interviews, there will no doubt be more outlandish stories on the way. Clearly, the joke’s on us.
