It’s difficult to conjure up too much sympathy for Robert Pattinson. He’s one of the most famous men in the world, he’s loved by a generation of diehard fans, he’s incredibly good looking, is a seriously talented actor and no doubt has money coming out of his ears and ass. Despite all that, you can kind of feel for him when he explains the dislocating process of committing yourself to a longterm movie franchise like Twilight (especially as it’s not very good).
In a recent interview with Variety as part of their ‘Actors on Actors’ series, Pattinson laid it all out, explaining his experience working on the YA adaptations and revealing that he felt like he lost his sense of identity.
“When something becomes really big you really get an awareness of how small you are, like where it is when you first start acting and you feel like a big shot when you’re only doing something small. My ego was a lot bigger when I first started.
Then you start losing control of a lot of different aspects of your life and also the job, especially when you’re doing sequels to something. It doesn’t matter what you think: a) it’s already been written in a book, and b) the tone has already been set up and the machine is already in motion. It’s frightening when you lose your sense of identity.”
To be fair, committing yourself at a young age to a multi-film deal and forever binding yourself to a big rule can’t be an easy decision for an actor to make, though the millions of dollars and worldwide fame should at least go some way to sooth any worries they might have.
Since the Twilight films concluded, Pattinson has made no secret of how he feels about fans of the franchise, saying in 2013, “Sometimes I ask myself what these masses of people do the whole day. They sit in front of their computers and comment on anything having even remotely to do with Twilight.”
More constructively, Pattinson has gone out of his way to prove that he’s not just a pretty (albeit pale) face, starring in the excellent David Cronenberg-directed surreal thriller Cosmopolis and currently appearing in the critically well-received thriller Good Time. Not that we ever had our doubts, but in his post-Twilight career, Robert Pattinson has more than solidified himself as a bonafide leading man.
