At 23, Robert Pattinson’s chosen career is simmering along quite nicely, thank you, with the handsome London actor pulling in an estimated $20 million, give or take a few bucks, last year.
Having kicked into high gear playing Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) before the hugely successful Twilight series, “R-Patz” (or sometimes even “Spunk Ransom”), as he is known, is the cause of instant hysteria among young women around the world and much innuendo in the gossip pages.
But he is in a relationship with his beautiful Twilight co-star, 19-year-old Kristen Stewart, and both are so in demand that you wouldn’t think they would have time to read anything salacious about themselves.
They don’t, but Pattinson gets reminded of it constantly, nevertheless.
“I still get my mum (Clare) calling me up every single day and questioning me about the gossip stuff,” he says with a slight shake of his head and a smile.
“I don’t like people I know reading that stuff about me because it kind of distorts everything. You’re inevitably going to find something bad eventually and I don’t want to be having to do PR to my family.”
Other than that, Pattinson’s sudden surge of fame through his vampire character, Edward Cullen, in the Twilight movie franchise has not overwhelmed him.
“My family has dealt with it really well,” he says. “I mean, they’re pretty untouched by it. My sisters (Victoria and chart-topping singer-songwriter Lizzy) are fine. They occasionally get their Facebook (pages) hacked into and stuff, but that’s the only downside.
“I’ve just been working in England and it’s the polar opposite to working in America. There’s no-one around the set and it is wholly different working there, so I’ve been getting to know what a normal life is like again.
“People are very different about it in London. If they do recognise me they’re embarrassed to say something and you can go into so many areas where people have no idea who you are.
“In London the other night I went out to have dinner in some pub somewhere and the barmaid had this whole conversation saying, ‘You look just like that guy from Twilight’. I was astonished because every time she came up she was like, ‘You literally could be his brother’ and she never put two and two together.”
But while Pattinson relishes his relative anonymity in England – in the US and elsewhere he inevitably draws a crowd – he sometimes struggles with whether or not he should just sweep fame up in his arms and embrace it.
“I’m wondering whether I’m holding on to something I should be letting go of by not changing anything,” he says.
“But, you know, I don’t particularly feel any different and I think because I’ve gone from job to job to job it means you stay in this sort of netherworld, so I feel relatively untouched.
“It’s kind of like accepting that you’re famous or just staying blind to it. I’m sort of wondering whether that’s the right way to go about things and whether it stops you growing as a person if you do that, but I don’t really know yet.”
He had one brief lesson in handling fame from Pierce Brosnan, who plays his father in the new film Remember Me, when the two went out to dinner together in New York.
“Some people were looking over,” Pattinson says. “They didn’t know who I was but they knew him, obviously. He went up to them and introduced himself and asked how their evening was going.
“At the time I was thinking like, ‘What are you doing?’ but it worked fantastically because no-one treated him like he was a sideshow attraction any more and I’m sure those people went home and said what a nice guy he was.
“I don’t really have the confidence to do that yet, but it works better than my method, which is just hiding under the table or leaving immediately if anyone looks around.”
Pattinson’s box office appeal has reached such a high point now that he is a producer on Remember Me, with input to deliberations on matters such as casting with fellow producer Nick Osborne and director Alan Coulter, who is mainly known for TV (The Sopranos, Sex and the City) but also did the movie Hollywoodland (2006), starring Ben Affleck.
“But I’m such a novice at all this,” Pattinson says. “At the end of the day it’s the director’s decision about casting.”
Apart from Brosnan, the movie stars Academy Award winner Chris Cooper (Adaptation, 2002), Oscar nominee Lena Olin (Enemies: A Love Story, 1989) and Australian Emilie de Raven, one of the stars of the TV series Lost.
“I read with a bunch of girls and I watched all the tapes – which is unheard of, normally, for an actor to watch the audition tapes – and that was interesting and a kind of incredible thing to be allowed to do,” Pattinson says.
“Emilie was the best out of all of them and Alan thought she was way, way best before I had even met her, so that was lucky.
“She was great to work with. She is not ‘actressy’ at all, totally unpretentious, and she’s got a lot of spunk and fire in her.”
Set in New York, Remember Me stars Pattinson as Tyler, a rebellious young man who, since the suicide of his older brother, has had a troubled relationship with his father.
Soon after taking a beating at the hands of a police officer (Cooper), Tyler meets college student Ally (de Ravin), who he later discovers is the police officer’s daughter.
Tyler and Ally, however, become soul-mates and are happy, but then their relationship is suddenly threatened.
“As soon as I read the script I just sort of related to it in a fundamental way, right from the beginning,” Pattinson says.
“I don’t know why. But I just felt very connected to it the first time I read it and as all the rewrites happened and everything about it changed, I still always felt like everything about it was very true.
“It seemed like it was written for a reason.”
Maybe just to make Robert Pattinson even more famous.
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