Robert Pattinson on His “Nihilistic” Batman and the Character’s Real Origin Story

He’s exceptionally good-looking. Huge, wild eyes. Giant facial options organized the place a sculptor might need put them in Sixteenth-century Italy. He’s, in contrast to some actors, taller than folks suppose. (“Loads of Batman followers are like, He’s tiny, he’s tiny! I’m not fucking tiny!” he says. “I’m, like, a giant particular person. About half the time, I’m attempting to get skinnier.”) He has that capacity to look convincingly completely different, by significant levels, in many alternative issues. It’s not simply hair and weight. It’s the way in which he can decrease or elevate an inner dimmer change to dial the eyes and mouth alongside a spectrum from, like, American scuzzbucket to French aristocrat. It permits him to work successfully as each a number one bat and a 12-minute scene-stealer. “He’s a chameleon,” Matt Reeves, director of The Batman, says. “Just lately, Rob was telling me that he by no means performs a personality with precisely his voice. The voice is considered one of his methods in.”

In London at this time, his pure accent is crisp and his phrases are prudent. However his laughter is freewheeling and he can’t assist however begin issues off by saying exactly what he feels: “I’m so fucking jet-lagged!” He’s underdressed: “It’s chilly! Fuck!” And he’s feeling his age (35): “I can’t do something anymore!” The impact is one thing like: English artwork seller after a weeklong honest in Hong Kong. He appears to be like like he was possibly at his shiniest six days in the past.

We’re strolling via Holland Park, on the base of Notting Hill. Not 18 hours earlier, the plan had been for us to go to the London Zoo, however he’d instantly thought higher of it. “I used to be speaking to my girlfriend”—the mannequin and actress Suki Waterhouse—“final evening and she or he was, like, ‘You recognize, folks don’t actually like zoos.…’ I’d been interested by a metaphorical factor. However then I used to be pondering that’s very unsuitable, a tragic bear strolling in circles.” He’d talked himself out of it.

“I simply can’t assist it,” he says. “I’ll do it for each single aspect, each choice, in my life. What’s the worst-case situation for this choice?”

His profession so far has been formed by a mixture of expertise, need, luck, attendant fame, and daring selections. The celebrity got here shortly, with Twilight, the teen-vampire saga that grossed billions of {dollars} and set Pattinson up for a selected type of path. The alternatives—smaller motion pictures with singular filmmakers—got here as a part of his masterfully deliberate, decade-long jail get away of that one explicit profession. “I’m always doing danger assessments, which drives everyone loopy, attempting to foretell each single aspect that would probably occur. After which, on the finish of it, simply being like: Ah, fuck it! I’ll simply play a lighthouse keeper who fucks a mermaid! I believe that is the proper transfer!”