Robert Pattinson is opening up about his deepest, darkest fear: being humiliated onscreen.
The “Twilight” alum and “The Batman” star said while in conversation with Jordan Firstman for Interview magazine that there are no excuses for a poor performance.
“I have a deep, deep fear of humiliation,” Pattinson said when asked if he ever took on a role that he did not believe in. “And also, you sort of know it’s down to you. You can say it’s a shitty script or the director’s a dick or blah, blah, blah, but at the end of the day, no one’s going to care about the reasons. You’re the one who everyone’s going to say is lame.”
He added, “And the vast majority of people will say you’re lame even when you tried your best.”
Pattinson continued about his worldview as a whole, “I mean, that’s kind of how I look at everything. I’m constantly thinking that you’re just going to spend the vast majority of your life unemployed and desperate and kind of feeling like you’re a total failure. I think that’s just what life is. I think it’s just part of it.”
The actor noted that “you’re specifically at a maximum most of the time you’re doing a job and you’re employed for three months. That’s the most stressful thing in the world.”
Pattinson previously told GQ in 2020 that after leading indies like “The Lighthouse” and “Good Time,” he needed to expand his career to include more commercial movies.
“I started the beginning of last year with no job,” Pattinson said at the time. “And I was calling my agent and just being like — I had gotten good reviews in stuff — and I was like, ‘What the fuck? I thought this was a pretty good year, and I’m fucking starting the year like I’ve just done a pile of trash.’”
He continued, “The problem which I was finding was, however much I loved the [indie] movies I was doing, no one sees them. And so it’s kind of this frightening thing, because I don’t know how viable this is for a career…I don’t know how many people there actually are in the industry who are willing to back you without any commercial viability whatsoever.”
Pattinson is set to reprise his role as Bruce Wayne in Matt Reeves’ sequel to “The Batman,” still in preproduction, and he stars in Bong Joon Ho’s sci-fi “Mickey 17,” out next year. Both are Warner Bros. releases.
