The director Robert Pattinson wanted to punch in the face in 2018: “The closest I’ve ever come”
Robert Pattinson might play some of the most formidable roles in recent cinema history, such as Matt Reeves’ Batman or small-time criminal Connie Nikas in the Safdie brothers’ Good Time, but when he isn’t smirking in front of the camera, he’s really just a meek British guy.
Famously, the Twilight breakout star knows that he is such an eccentric guy that he once took a stalker out for a meal, and complained, in detail, about his life to such a sordid degree that his stalker was spooked away from his front drive. Though this tale came straight from Pattinson’s mouth, we might be best to take it with a pinch of salt, after he admitted recently that he lies in interviews all the time to keep the interviewer guessing, and himself amused.
All this said, the duddering model and actor, now happily cohabiting with Suki Waterhouse, once found his quintessential British calm (and charm) put to the test on the set of a particularly demanding movie, in which the climate, the script, the direction, and the demands pushed him to his limit.
In Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, Pattinson plays the secretive timber worker Ephraim Winslow, who takes on the role of assistant lighthouse keeper alongside seasoned boss Thomas Wake, played by Willem Dafoe, as the pair spiral into a suffocating, claustrophobic, reality-bending madness with one another. In this, Eggers knew that to really convince the viewer, he had to pull the level of lunacy and derangement from a very real place.
In a joint discussion with Interview magazine, Dafoe and Pattinson discussed the often gruelling conditions on set, which were necessary to birth the critically acclaimed masterpiece. After Dafoe kindly deemed Pattinson a “warrior” for what he had to withstand, he conjured up a specific scene in which Pattinson was “being sprayed with that water, and it stung so bad”.
The Remember Me star knew exactly what Dafoe was referring to, adding sensationally, “That’s the closest I’ve come to punching a director. However much I love Robert [Eggers], there was a point where I did five takes walking across the beach, and after a while I was like, “What the fuck is going on? I feel like you’re just spraying a fire hose in my face’.”
Matter-of-factly, Eggers gave Pattinson a response he didn’t want to hear, as the latter recounted, “He was like, ‘I am spraying a fire hose in your face’. It was like some kind of torture. It definitely creates an interesting energy”.
If Pattinson wanted to wring Egger’s neck that day, he managed to swallow the initial call to violence.
Much later, when Eggers heard about Pattinson’s exasperation, he was taken aback, sharing with Backstage, “Even if he wanted to punch me, that’s how Rob was. Rob and Willem wanted to be pushed to that level. Where you get yourself into a [bad] situation is if you’re working with an actor who is fearful to put themself out there, but, hopefully, you don’t cast someone who doesn’t have courage.” Thankfully, the two remain good friends to this day.
