Fame has made him live hiding and to go out only at night. Like his character in Twilight. Robert Pattinson detoxes himself briefly with Remember Me.
Robert Pattinson assures us that he has found the way to go unnoticed: grow a beard. “It works, the other day, in a bar, a guy told me that I looked like the guy from Twilight. That I had to go see the movie”, he explains. It pains us to tell him that is not so. He is wearing a baseball hat and a blondish beard. An antipaparazzi classic uniform that will hardly make him invisible. This 23 years old Londoner has had to digest fame very quickly. A few years back he lived out of the royalties from his small role as Cedric Diggory, the handsome guy of Hogwarts, in 2 of the Harry Potter films. He was a guy from an expensive school, with a stable family, that used to hang out in pubs and played the guitar. He was about to stop acting when he was called for a casting in LA for the highly anticipated adaptation to Stephanie Meyer’s vampire saga.
Five thousand candidates aspired to be the irresistible bloodsucker Edward Cullen. The director, Catherine Hardwicke did not choose any of those: “I saw so many handsome guys. That was the problem. They all looked like the typical cute guys from school. None of them gave me the impression of coming from another time or era” declared Hardwicke.
Pattinson had not read Twilight and had no idea about the cult surrounding the books. He bought a plane ticket from his own pocket money and slept at his agent. He took a Valium before the casting, but something connected between him and the already hired Kristen Stewart. “When they met, we felt a very strong chemistry. All electricity” said Hardwicke. Pattinson got the part. He had no clue of what was coming to him.
Overnight, he started to be followed by screaming women, harassed by photographers, immersed in real stampedes. He had to learn to live locked in hotels and to go out only at night. Ironically, playing a vampire made him live like one: ” I never thought of this before, but it’s true. It’s incredible the hysteria and exaggeration that can develop”, he assures us with his eyes wide open, like is he is seeing indescribable horrors.
The particularity of the Pattinson effect is his reach across generations. To the predictable teenager followers, groups of untied adult women, called the Twilight Moms have joined; thanks to Edward and Bella (the lovers that Pattinson and the mortal Stewart play) they are replaying their fantasies and “hotness” from puberty. Even the older professionals cannot resist: Camilla Long, a sour reporter from the newspaper The Times, announced excitedly in Twitter that she managed to steal a kiss from the actor during a recent interview.
“The craziest ones are the twenty somethings, the ones that still think they are teenagers”, explains the actor between laughs. He corrects himself immediately: ” actually, there are very few that are crazy. I’ve had very few bad experiences. They are only girls that camp out for several days in order to have a social life. For them I am something like an excuse. It’s people that come from far away towns and travel to the big city for the first time”. He pronounces “people” like he is talking about extra terrestrial creatures. “They feel secure because they are surrounding themselves with people with the same likes”
But sudden notoriety also brings positive consequences. Twilight has made him one of the best payed professional in the movies. According to the list from Vanity Fair, in 2009 he made 18 million dollars, what puts him 2 spots above Brad Pitt in earnings in Hollywood. An according to Anna Kendrick (who managed to morph from the virginal friend of Bella from Twilight to a flaming Oscar nomination for Up in the Air), the Brit is the only actor that can make George Clooney jealous.
In person, Pattinson is a well educated twenty something with a nervous laugh, still ashamed of being the center of attention. He tends to define many things like “weird” and like a good Brit, self promotion and fuss embarrass him. There has been plenty written about his phobia to shower, but on this occasion he has a fresh look and smells clean.
He introduces his most recent work, Remember Me, a romantic drama that takes place in New York before September 11. He plays a boy that is very tortured with his past and that falls in love with a student from him same college ( Emilie de Ravin, the first time mom from Lost). He will soon discover that they share similar tragedies. He chose the project because of its reality: ” I accepted the role before Twilight. I knew that I had to do several films from the fantastic saga and I liked the idea of a character and a story so real. Watching it is like watching a piece of the life of a family”
Remember Me wont be the title that will show a new facet of Pattinson. The actor has spent the last 113 minutes of the film polishing the expression of existential anguish similar to the one that the sensitive Edward the vampire has. And smoking like a truck driver. ” The fact that a the lead character smokes is unusual. But was is most unusual is that that is the most polemic issue of the film. To me, it’s a detail that makes him more real. Most twenty something smoke”. Pattinson admits that he too is a smoker.
REad More EL Pais
Thanks RPLife
Inga kommentarer:
Skicka en kommentar