There’s actually a clever strategy behind Robert Pattinson’s recent string of bizarre antics.

Robert Pattinson first came to our attention as a centuries-old vampire, which probably explains why he’s so good at quietly reinventing himself.

The 34-year-old actor shot to fame as Edward Cullen in the blockbuster Twilight franchise, which went on to top the box office and become the centre of an intense global fandom that is still active to this day.

After the final Twilight film was released in 2012, Pattinson, much like his former co-star and ex-girlfriend Kristen Stewert, opted to stay mostly out of the mainstream Hollywood spotlight in favour of appearing in lower-budget films.

Now he’s dipping a toe back into the blockbuster pool by filming the title role in the new Batman movie. Yet, over the years Pattinson has actually become better known for his quirky interview antics than for his acting.

Case in point, his recent profile for GQ magazine sent the internet into a frenzy when the interviewer incorporated into the piece that the actor had staged a virtual cooking segment just for his viewing pleasure, in order to break up their extensive Facetime chats.

For a deep dive on Robert Pattinson’s GQ profile, along with the other top entertainment stories of the day, listen to The Spill. 

However, what was on the menu in Pattinson’s kitchen turned out to be the actual cuisine of nightmares. A concoction of penne, processed cheese, sugar, out-of-date cornflakes and sauce all wrapped in foil, then placed in a microwave and left to literally blow up.

No doubt the interview instantly became notorious due to the fact that audiences were already primed for some trademark Pattinson craziness.

Prior to this, Pattinson’s films were also not the source of his last big media blitz, which came in February of this year after he proudly told Allure that he, in fact, smelled like a crayon. At least according to anyone who had ever been in close contact with him.

If you dig back a little further into his news archives, his last slew of media attention came at the tail end of 2019, when he confusingly confessed to Jennifer Lopez during an Actors on Actors conversation that he believes there is a ballerina living inside him…

And while there’s nothing technically wrong with such a statement, it just had no real place in the conversation that was occurring at the time.

It’s been previously theorised by Pattinson fans that embedding these bizarre moments and soundbites into his interviews is just his way of trolling us all and having some fun with the press rounds. Or perhaps that his mind really does work in an odd way and therefore, he’s just speaking his truth.

But if you take a deeper look at his earliest days of fame, I’d wager that neither of these options is actually correct.

 

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“I’m just barely doing anything.” Revisit our June/July cover story with Robert Pattinson at the link in bio. Self-portraits by Robert Pattinson.

A post shared by GQ (@gq) on May 17, 2020 at 10:09am PDT

Instead, it’s all just a strategy put in place by a man who has had some of the most intimate moments of his life viciously dissected in the public eye. At this stage of his career, he’s finally found a viral talking point that trumps his personal life.

During the most frenzied of the Twilight press days, from 2008 through to 2012, Pattinson’s demeanour on red carpets, in taped interviews and at awards shows increasingly soured.

In that time he made no secret of the fact that the personal intrusion that came paired with the paycheque was, in his eyes, not a fair trade.

Then in 2012, an event happened that ensured Robert Pattinson would, for the foreseeable future, have his personal life at the top of every interview agenda. That was the year Us Weekly published photos of his then-girlfriend Kristen Stewart kissing her Snow White and the Huntsman director, Rupert Sanders, who was married with children.

Despite the fact that the Twilight stars had always attempted to keep their relationship under the radar after the films had wrapped, Kristen Stewart issued a public apology to Pattinson on July 25, 2012 which said, “I’m deeply sorry for the hurt and embarrassment I’ve caused to those close to me and everyone this has affected. This momentary indiscretion has jeopardised the most important thing in my life, the person I love and respect the most, Rob. I love him. I love him. I’m so sorry.”

The couple broke up for good in 2013 and in the years that followed, no matter what film he was promoting or what cause he was speaking about, every Robert Pattinson interview was overlayed with questions about Stewart, cheating and any new relationships he appeared to be in.

In 2014 he gave a somewhat snarky interview to Esquire U.K about the relationship saying “Sh*t happens, you know? It’s just young people… it’s normal! And honestly, who gives a sh*t?”

In 2017 he attempted to deflect questions from Howard Stern about his possible engagement to FKA twigs. Speaking about the flurried interest in his personal life, he said: “It’s one of the most frustrating things in the world, you have to make these decisions, like whether you want to let the crazy people in.”

It was a media strategy that did little to deflect this line of personal questioning and the more cagey or defensive he got, the more marketable the headlines became.

So Robert Pattinson changed tact, quietly morphing from brooding, broken RPatz to quirky, oddball RPatz with every interview he did.

And no one grills an oddball on his personal life.

After all, that extensive GQ cover story, along with other recent interviews, failed to dwell on his relationship with model Suki Waterhouse. Despite the fact that his relationship with the It Girl made a splash in 2018 when they were first linked.

It appears that Robert Pattinson decided he couldn’t let morsels of his personal life be dissected in interviews and so he has turned them into performance art, escalating his new ‘character’ with each new magazine cover.

If you look at it that way, it’s his best acting yet.

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