A couple of Decembers ago, I went to a posh west London restaurant to have dinner with the actor Robert Pattinson, once a sexy vampire, now a famous bat. Pattinson grew up in London, but at the time he didn’t have a permanent local address, so he was holed up in a nearby rental, every now and then performing PR duties for his latest film, The Lighthouse, and beginning rehearsals for The Batman. Our meeting became a cover story for the Observer Magazine, where I had recently accepted a full-time job. Pattinson arrived late and sat down offering apologies. He was wearing a blue cap that he kept adjusting self-consciously. I wondered if he felt he was being watched, but when I looked around nobody appeared to be taking much notice. To me the situation seemed strange regardless. I had a background in reporting, not in writing actor interviews, and going for dinners with famous people was not something I was practiced at. I remember once looking at Pattinson and thinking, simply and childishly, OK, here is a celebrity…
R-Patz running his fingers through his hair, by Danielle Levitt
Pattinson wasn’t in a great mood. He’d been excited to begin rehearsals, he told me. The Batman was shooting in the same north London studios in which he’d made Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the film that brought him to stardom, and he found the familiar surroundings comforting. But things weren’t going well, and he’d now come to expect the worst. What the worst was and why things weren’t going well he didn’t specify, though for a long time we spoke about his tendency to worry that, sooner or later, some or all parts of his life would turn to shit. “I’m a catastrophist,” he muttered. “I’m always thinking that the worst-case scenario is actually going to happen. So when it does happen, I’m like, ‘Gah! OK! I’m prepared!’ ”
It’s difficult to take this kind of thinking seriously when the thinking is being done by someone like Pattinson. Was he really worried, or was he just playing? In a recent GQ interview, Pattinson rehashed similar concerns: “I can’t help it. I’ll do it for every single element, every decision, in my life. What is the worst-case scenario for this decision?” This suggests the worry might be a Pattinson bit. But I believed him, and bad things did come to pass. Pattinson broke his wrist on The Batman set. And the pandemic shut everything down soon after, delaying production for months. In the Observer Magazine piece, I wrote that Pattinson seemed committed to the concept of his own ordinariness — “I’m nervous on, like, every single movie,” he told me — even though he is one of Britain’s finest actors. When we met, he seemed truly concerned that The Batman would turn out only OK, and that somehow or other the film’s mediocrity, hypothetical at that point, would be his fault. (His career Plan B, he told me, was to move into “art house porn,” a comment New York picked up and which became a thing.) I couldn’t quite get to grips with his anxiety — why was he thinking this way? At the time, The Lighthouse was receiving very good reviews. He’d recently appeared in several other excellent, offbeat productions. He was working with exceptional directors. And now he was playing a major superhero… The interview’s cover-line read: “Robert Pattinson’s Baffling Self-Doubt.”
Pattinson having a rest, taking it easy, by Danielle Levitt
At the beginning of our conversation, Pattinson asked if I was planning to eat.
I had read somewhere that even though he was already muscular, he was bulking up.
“Yes,” I said. “Sure.”
He nodded.
We ordered a couple of beers and clinked glasses. Then he ordered some bread as a kind of starter. It arrived with a pot of olive oil, which he used as a dip. For a while we looked at the menu, but we didn’t order anything else — no more food — just a couple more beers. I remember thinking, What an odd job, to be given a timed slot to watch Robert Pattinson dunk bread for dinner. At the end of the interview, a couple of hours later, Pattinson upped and left, leaving me to pay the bill, which is what normally happens in these situations. I called over a waitress and paid by card. As soon as she walked away, I left, too. Only later did I notice that my card had been declined and the bill had been left unpaid. Worrying I might get in trouble at work, I rang the restaurant and offered to pay over the phone. A woman asked me what table I’d been sitting at.
“A table in the corner,” I said.
“And there were two of you?”
“Yes.”
“And one of you left first?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You don’t need to pay,” she said.
“I don’t?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s taken care of.”
I thanked her and put down the phone. Then I realised that people had been watching all along.
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My next post will be about talking to my son about climate change, which is not an easy or fun thing to do but which seems necessary, just as it seems necessary to talk to him about Ukraine — how there is a sickening war going on not just there but in other parts of the world, too, and why it is important for us to learn. Peace.