Ever since his time on The Twilight Saga ended, Robert Pattinson has sought to reinvent himself as a different kind of actor, which he’s largely accomplished. A string of acclaimed turns in low budget independent movies saw him lauded as one of the most daring and dedicated young talents in the business, before he eventually circled back around to blockbuster cinema.
Pattinson famously tried to pull a fast one on Tenet director Christopher Nolan so he could duck out of shooting for a day to audition for The Batman, which the filmmaker hilariously called him out for. Based on his history as a sparkly vampire, there was inevitably backlash when the 35 year-old was cast, but yesterday’s jaw-dropping trailer has put those doubts to bed.
Matt Reeves admitted in the buildup to the new footage his biggest concern was that Pattinson would be much more interested in playing Bruce Wayne than he would Batman, which could have soured him on accepting the part.
“I really did think, oh my God, this version of this character, this guy who sort of almost like, if you think of Bruce Wayne as like a reckless rock star in a decaying manner, there’s this part of me that self saw you as that, and I had no idea that you would be interested in playing the role at all. And I thought, ‘What if Rob doesn’t want to play Batman? This will be a disaster.’ And then it turned out that you completely on your own had a whole path to the same thing, which is that you had been obsessed with Batman for years. And when you found out that we were doing this version, you were very interested.”
Luckily, Pattinson was more than ready to dip his toes back into the water of big budget studio fare, and he’s got all the makings of an excellent Dark Knight, based on what we witnessed yesterday. He’s largely tried to shy away from fame and publicity during the last decade, but The Batman is set to take the leading man’s career to an entirely new level when it hits theaters in March of next year.
