Today, former teen idols can no longer disown those projects, no matter how tacky, that turned them into stars. In an age in which even harrowing dramas are promoted by social media reels of actors competitively guzzling chicken wings or cuddling puppies, any mention of a cheesy breakout role must be gamely embraced, before thanks are again offered to the fans, and for the opportunity.
What A-listers angling for awards do not do, however, is actively raise such skeletons. Leonardo DiCaprio did not secure his Oscar for The Revenant through allusions to his late-80s sitcom Growing Pains. Likewise, Joaquin Phoenix rarely brings up Spaceballs, and Jacob Elordi keeps pretty tight-lipped on The Kissing Booth 3.
Not so Robert Pattinson. The British actor, 40, is now being spoken of as the clear standout in Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey. As well as being the starriest production mounted in some years, the $250m blockbuster is easily the year’s most highly anticipated film and, so far, the 2027 best picture Oscar winner to beat.
Pattinson’s performance as Antinous, villainous suitor to Penelope (Anne Hathaway) in the absence of her husband, Odysseus (Matt Damon), was lavished with praise by critics sharing first thoughts before the film’s review embargo is lifted next Wednesday. “He absolutely stole the show for me,” wrote US critic Erik Davis, calling him “so conniving, manipulative and endlessly entertaining to watch”. Supporting actor Oscar chatter is rife, the consensus being that this is the latest slam dunk in a career marked by curveball choices and artistic daring from a man who has long broken free of his pin-up roots.
And yet, on the red carpet at the film’s world premiere on Monday, Pattinson went out of his way to liken Homer’s 3,000-year-old epic poem – and its very weighty movie version – to the Twilight Saga, the series about horny teen vampires in which he starred almost 20 years ago.
“I keep comparing it,” he said. “[Antinous] is kind of like Jacob in Twilight. What The Odyssey is about – Penelope just can’t make her mind up between the two guys. And I’m just trying to, like, help her make a decision. It’s like, ‘It’s fine. He’s dead, get over it.’”
In the four Twilight movies, Pattinson played Edward Cullen: pale, undead and locked in a love triangle with emo schoolgirl Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and hunky werewolf Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner). Born in Barnes in 1986, Pattinson was cast in the role in 2007 – despite having no training and little experience – after producers requested a list of Harry Potter actors who scored highly on the IMDb’s “starmeter”, an accolade he’d earned with his turn as doomed Quidditch dish Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (his first cinema screen credit).
Summoned for a chemistry test with 17-year-old Stewart at director Catherine Hardwicke’s home, the actor impressed both women with a commitment so intense he fell off the bed during a kissing scene, and Hardwicke felt the need to remind him of California’s age of consent.
“He’s a real movie star, and that was clear the minute he appears in the first Twilight,” says veteran film journalist Steven Gaydos. “Hardwicke did the movie world a big favour when she put Pattinson together with Stewart, as their mutual star power obscured the franchise’s loopy werewolves-and-vampires silliness and kept the focus on love and heat between two major new charismatic movie stars.”
The pair eventually dated for four years, while the series grossed $3.36bn. Both actors have had dramatically unconventional career paths since. “For a long time,” says Guy Lodge, chief critic of Variety, “they were the industry’s joint poster children for the teen idol turned serious actor arc. When he followed up the last Twilight chapter by lining up films from David Cronenberg, Werner Herzog, the Safdie brothers, James Gray, Claire Denis and so on, he couldn’t have stated his artistic aspirations any more emphatically.”
Whether having his prostate examined in the back of a limo (Cosmopolis), being constantly cloned (Mickey 17) or gloomily masturbating to a wooden mermaid before being pecked to death by gulls (The Lighthouse), Pattinson’s consistently perverse decision-making has ensured, says Gaydos, that he has never settled into “coasting or fulfilling audience and business expectations”. Instead, he has proved himself “an accomplished and fearless actor with tremendous range. His freewheeling work in The Drama boasts character swings that would defeat most actors.”
Lodge also singles out The Drama, a buzzy and controversial couples comedy-drama from earlier this year, calling it “the perfect vehicle for Pattinson’s balance of lightweight and heavyweight skills. He plays the knockabout cringe comedy exquisitely, but it’s a performance rooted in deep pain and anxiety, and quite possibly his best to date.”
The actor’s easy fraternal bond with co-star Zendaya when promoting that film was also an echo of the relaxed and chummy chemistry he had demonstrated the previous year with Jennifer Lawrence, his co-star in gruelling postnatal depression drama Die My Love.
His own private life – following his relationship with Stewart, and another with FKA twigs, he now has a young daughter with long-term girlfriend Suki Waterhouse – adds to Pattinson’s selling point as an actor who, while unafraid to embrace the unconventional in his work, is apparently happy to remain fairly uncomplicated at home.
Like many of today’s hottest male stars – Josh O’Connor, Brad Pitt, Seth Rogen – he’s an eager ceramicist, as well as a keen domestic inventor, whose ideas include an arancini-like dish called piccolini cuscino (“little pillow”), with which he almost went into partnership with a frozen-food manufacturer, and a 9ft-long sofa with armrests as wide as the seat (“It weighs a ton” – and has yet to find a buyer).
Zendaya stars alongside Pattinson in The Odyssey, as well as in Dune 3, which is set to be this Christmas’s major opening – and one of The Odyssey’s chief awards rivals. Later this year, Pattinson will also headline Primetime, a low-budget drama about the US TV show To Catch a Predator. Then, in early 2027, comes his second time donning black cap and tails as caped crusader Batman in Matt Reeves’s acclaimed DC update.
“He’s drifted back toward commercial cinema,” says Lodge, “but he’s now a looser, more interesting actor for his arthouse dabblings. In both [2020’s] Tenet and The Odyssey, he brings wit and irony to Nolan’s dour writing, and while there was little fighting the po-faced darkness of The Batman, he gave the superhero a rare flash of soul and sex.”
And it is this erotic wit, perhaps, that is key to Pattinson’s overall appeal and his triumph in The Odyssey, a movie that more broadly prizes moral stoicism and fortitude over the pleasures of the flesh. At his costume fitting for that film, Pattinson recently told GQ, “I was like, ‘I really want to have leopard underpants – I want to have it just coming out of my skirt, a little sparkly fur.’”
This strain of the subversive is readily detected in his performance, says the Guardian’s film critic Peter Bradshaw, who calls it “saturnine, faintly reptilian and odious … an out-and-out bad guy, to which his haughty aristocratic looks lend themselves”. While Gaydos sees Pattinson as inheriting “the cheekbones and chops of Hollywood golden era leading men like Robert Taylor and Tyrone Power”, Bradshaw instead opts for Alan Rickman: the same devilish sense of fun and sensuality paired with an impeccable nice-guy reputation backstage.
Two of Pattinson’s films this year have already proved huge hits and the other three on the horizon are set fair. Yet regardless of their fate, his future as one of the most bankable, charismatic and unpredictable actors of his generation seems assured. If only he’d been around a bit earlier, says Gaydos. “If Alfred Hitchcock were directing films today, one can only imagine the thrills and fun he’d create with Pattinson in the frame.”
