The role Robert Pattinson didn’t think he could pull off: “I did feel a bit of a risk”
For the longest time, Robert Pattinson was known simply as “that guy from Twilight”. The British actor rose to international prominence playing shiny vampire Edward Cullen in the hit movies, winning over millions of fans and forcing teenagers all over the world to pick between him and Taylor Lautner. It seemed like R-Patz would never shake this character off, but then something happened.
Pattinson began to take more and more adventurous roles. He appeared as a troubled billionaire in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, then as a cunning criminal in the Safdie brothers’ Good Time. Then, in 2018, he starred opposite Willem Dafoe in The Lighthouse, a tense psychological thriller from the mind of Robert Eggers. Both actors received praise for their performances, with many commenting on how it felt like Pattinson had finally arrived. However, the man himself had serious doubts ahead of filming.
“I couldn’t really get my head around it at first,” Pattinson told Screen Daily. “It’s such a feat of maintaining multiple different tones that when I read it, I thought, ‘I can’t actually imagine how it’s going to gel together.’ I could see that it was really good, but I did feel a bit of a risk doing it.”
The actor had sought Eggers out after watching his debut film, The Witch. “You could see that he was a master, technically,” he said of Eggers’ work. “I liked that it seemed as if they built a world – where if the camera were to move in any direction, it would seem just as full. But I didn’t think I wanted to do a horror film.”
After their meeting, the two became fast friends and set about finding a project they could work on together. “We talked about a couple of things which were more conventional, but also big and kind of gothic,” said Pattinson. “I’m always a little wary of playing in an English period [production], so I said to him, ‘I just want to do something weird.’ And then he sent me this.”
The Lighthouse began life as an adaptation of an unfinished Edgar Allen Poe story by Eggers’ brother, Max. The two siblings worked on the project together and were inspired by a real life incident at the Smalls Lighthouse in Wales. Eggers’ interpretation of his various source materials led him to create a story where two men, Ephraim Winslow (Pattinson) and Thomas Wake (Dafoe), become trapped in a lighthouse during a storm and slowly slide into madness.
The director insisted that his two stars spend a week together rehearsing before shooting began, something Pattinson was initially hesitant to do. “I always feel that it’s just rolling the dice,” he said of his belief that screen acting is better when it comes together naturally. “When I was younger, I really thought acting was much more of a test – ‘Oh, the beat is supposed to be here, and that’s supposed to be the change point.’ I just got so nervous and stiff. Then I realised, if you know the lines but you don’t know where it’s going to go, it’s just so much easier. It’s also much more enjoyable.”
Fans can see Pattinson next in Bong Joon-Ho’s sci-fi adventure Mickey 17, in which he plays a worker drone who is constantly regenerated every time he dies. The film was due to be released in March 2024 but was pushed back until April 2025 following various delays. As for Eggers, his interpretation of the classic vampire movie Nosferatu is due in cinemas in December 2024.
