Bizarre Things Robert Pattinson Has Said In Interviews

Like his Oscar-nominated former co-star (and former flame) Kristen Stewart, "Twilight" star Robert Pattinson has moved away from the young adult fare that launched him to fame and has spent the past decade acting in critically acclaimed films like "Good Time," "The Lighthouse," and "High Life." Though his critical notices for "Twilight" were, shall we say, less than stellar, he has fully turned his reputation around, to the point where Far Out calls him "one of the greatest leading actors of the modern generation." 

Speaking of Pattinson's reputation, he's also known for something besides his acting skills: being an absolutely chaotic presence in interviews. The latest actor to don Batman's cowl (and eyeliner) seems to enjoy making himself laugh, and it seems one of his favorite pastimes is trying to throw off journalists and fans who ask him to talk about himself and his career. From wild anecdotes about exploding clowns to that time he blew up a microwave while trying to invent a cornflake-encrusted pasta dish, here are some of the most bizarre things Robert Pattinson has said in interviews.

Picture it: It's 2008. You and your besties are lined up hours early for the midnight premiere of "Twilight," the first adaptation of your favorite series of vampiric romance novels. You're so excited to see your beloved characters brought to life on the big screen, but you're nervous about how they're going to make Edward Cullen sparkle in the sunlight, so you tell your friends, "I'm sure R-Patz will look good no matter how silly the sparkling is." Guess what? Robert Pattinson hates you.

As the franchise was winding to a close years later, Pattinson told The Guardian he was not a fan of the cutesy nickname which had come to define his "Twilight" stardom. In the interview, the actor reflected on negative opinions from people who disliked his early acting and dismissed his later attempts at more respectable filmmaking because they discounted his work in the YA series. "When I got this part [in David Cronenberg's 'Cosmopolis'], every single article that came out, was, 'R-Patz's struggle for credibility!'" he said. "I don't understand who invented that thing, 'R-Patz', I want to strangle them." He went even further in a 2012 interview with The Sydney Morning Herald, insisting, "I would like to break the hands and mouth of the person who came up with it." Yikes, R-Patz! We do it cause we love ya.

In 2011, Robert Pattinson starred in "Water for Elephants" as a veterinarian who runs away to join the circus. Pattinson developed a much-publicized friendship with Tai, his elephant co-star, though he denied to Collider that anything weird was taking place. "I wasn't flirting with the elephant," he insisted. "I think I had a relationship with the elephant, but it was based purely on candy." He described sucking on peppermints and sticking them to his armpits, thereby getting the elephant to sniff him regularly, which apparently looked like flirting to people on set who didn't know what he'd done.

However, that wasn't the anecdote that made headlines. R-Patz appeared on "The Today Show" to promote the film and told Matt Lauer about a traumatic memory from the first time he went to the circus. "The first time I went to a circus, somebody died ... one of the clowns died," he said. Lauer questioned him, seeming surprised by the story, and Pattinson elaborated, "His little car exploded. The joke car exploded on him. Seriously. ... Everybody ran out. It was terrifying."

However, at the film's German premiere, he admitted to having lied. "I said those things. But I actually made the whole thing up," he admitted. "It's coming back to haunt me. ... Someone asked me what my experience with the circus was, and I was like, 'Oh god, I have nothing interesting to say.' ... I don't know why I said that!"

Robert Pattinson has been the face of Dior cologne since 2013. In addition to print ads, he has appeared in commercials for the luxury brand, such as one where he, uh, romances a woman under a restaurant tablecloth. This side gig means Pattinson gets asked about the collaboration sometimes in interviews, and it seems that he has some bizarre thoughts about the very concept of smell.

In an interview with Allure, Pattinson seemed confused when asked to describe the scent of the new Dior cologne. "People are like, 'Is it woody smelling?'" he related. "But I don't really know what wood smells like. It definitely makes me feel more awake." He said that, in his opinion, the best smell is being in love — notably, not a smell — and he added that people think he's weird because he enjoys the smell of "grimy stuff." We're reminded of when Kristen Stewart told Vogue (via ONTD) that Pattinson liked the scent of her armpits so much that he actually licked them.

Finally, fatefully, Allure asked Pattinson to describe his own scent. He answered, "Lots of people tell me I smell like a crayon. ... Like I'm embalmed." A fan on Twitter asked the important follow-up question, unfortunately to no answer: "What color? Details matter."

By now it should be clear that Robert Pattinson loves to volley with an interviewer. That sense of playfulness and unpredictability doesn't just extend to interviews with professional journalists; it turns out the "Tenet" star is just as bizarre when answering questions that come from his fans. Pattinson joined Reddit for an AMA — an "Ask Me Anything" Q&A session — back in 2017. Under the username Rob_Pattinson, the actor answered questions from fans that ranged from the personal to the ridiculous, and his answers were just as oddball as one might expect.

A fan of Pattinson's work in the adventure film "The Lost City of Z" was curious about how bad the mosquitos were while shooting; the jungle-set film was shot in the tropical rainforests of Colombia. Pattinson, who played real-life explorer Henry Costin in the movie, replied, "​​I don't get bitten by them. blood too toxic." Someone asked what his life is like outside of acting, and the thespian showed his commitment to his craft when he replied simply, "sucks."

A fan asked if he folds or scrunches, and in a series of replies, he wrote, "toilet paper?" Seeming to decide, he answered, "mummify." And then he thought better, declaring, "mittens." Finally, a Redditor sent him a picture of one of his iconically messy haircuts, asking if he'd lost a bet. R-Patz wrote back, "if you try it, you will understand why." We'll have to take his word on that one!

Though a pair of young-adult franchises launched his career into the stratosphere — lest we forget, he played Cedric Diggory in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" — Robert Pattinson moved on to considerably more respectable fare as soon as he could put his "Twilight" days in the rearview mirror. In 2019, he starred in "The Lighthouse," one of the year's most critically acclaimed films; Pattinson played a newbie lighthouse keeper going slowly insane while trapped on an island with a more seasoned keeper portrayed by Willem Dafoe.

The juicy role landed him a spot in Variety's Actors On Actors issue, pairing him with another of the year's most talked-about stars: Jennifer Lopez, who at the time was getting awards buzz for her turn in "Hustlers." Their sit-down is full of gems, such as a moment where Pattinson told Lopez what drew him to the script was, "Get to have sex with a mermaid, and constantly naked. I have a cool mustache."

JLo famously performed a striptease routine to Fiona Apple's "Criminal" in "Hustlers," and accordingly, another highlight of the interview came when Pattinson told the triple threat that he wanted to try his own hand at dancing on-screen ... specifically ballet. "Something I was trying to find for years was to do a ballet movie," he said. "And then my agent was like, 'Why? Do you know how to ballet?' I'm like, 'No.' I think there's a ballerina inside me." Lopez gamely agreed, "Yeah, there's a ballerina in there." 

Robert Pattinson spent the early part of his career as a teen heartthrob, idolized and adored by millions of young people around the world. The "Twilight" series sparked levels of fanfic heretofore unseen by the modern world, much of it sexual in nature ... most famously, of course, E.L. James' "Fifty Shades of Grey" series, which began as "Twilight" fan fiction before becoming the BDSM behemoth it is today. That may seem odd when you consider the series itself was famously about abstinence, but there was clearly something in Stephenie Meyer's writing that spoke to a repressed sexuality that Pattinson embodied on screen.

Now that Pattinson is all grown up, though, there's no need for him to hold back when talking about his sex life because there's no virginal, vampiric image to protect. To that end, when Pattinson appeared on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" in 2014, things got a little kinky. "I have extraordinarily heavy saliva," he told the surprised host. "I noticed it the other day," he added, his brain seeming to be working faster than his mouth as he struggled to get the anecdote out; he concluded that sometimes when he lies, it helps his saliva thin out. Then, things took a personal turn. "Have you ever had someone spit on you in a kind of erotic way?" he asked the surprised host, smirking. Kimmel thought about it before answering in the negative, and Pattinson added, "It's pretty great."

Robert Pattinson has an exciting life. When he's not starring in mega-budget action films like "Tenet" and "The Batman," the actor travels the world acting in smaller films like "The Rover" (filmed in Australia) and "The Lost City of Z" (in South America). He's had a number of highly publicized romantic entanglements, too, both with co-stars and other people in the industry. (That being said, he claims he doesn't particularly have hobbies, telling GQ, "When anybody asks me, What are your hobbies? I'm like: F***ing fretting. Worrying about the future.")

Along those lines, German magazine Bravo (via The Standard) asked Pattinson what he'd do if he ran the world. The actor had an unconventional proposition meant to keep everyone's life just as exciting as his is, insisting that if he were in charge, "I'd prohibit boring people. In my opinion there is nothing worse." Furthermore, he added, "The people who were boring should be in prison and be forced to learn to be creative with the other prisoners."

Lesson learned: if you ever meet Robert Pattinson, you'd better keep it interesting!

The "Twilight" series was a bonafide phenomenon, racking up hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office and untold numbers of fans around the world ... which, at its peak, meant a lot of attention focused on Robert Pattinson himself. While that usually just meant screaming fans showing up to premieres and television appearances, waving pictures and cameras in hopes of an autograph or a selfie, at least one fan took it too far.

Pattinson told CREME Magazine (via Digital Spy) that he had one fan interaction that went sideways. "I had a stalker while filming a movie in Spain last year," he confessed. "She stood outside of my apartment every day for weeks — all day every day." While that might scare away a lot of actors, leading them to hire security, Pattinson took a different approach. "I was so bored and lonely that I went out and had dinner with her," the "Little Ashes" star told the magazine. That may seem like a dream come true to the sort of person who would camp outside an actor's apartment, but the dinner did not go the way the fan likely hoped. While Pattinson had previously confessed that he hates boring people and would love to lock them up, the actor recalled that he wasn't the best dinner buddy and may need to toss himself in prison. "I just complained about everything in my life," he said, "and she never came back. People get bored of me in, like, two minutes."

Robert Pattinson rocketed to international superstardom when he played Edward Cullen in the "Twilight" franchise. The role won him millions of fans, but it seems that Pattinson was not as wild about the source material as the adoring public was; he has made no secret over the years of the fact that he is very much not a TwiHard.

Speaking with E! back in 2008, Pattinson expressed his confusion about the book's popularity and shared a theory about author Stephenie Meyer. "When I read [the book] ... I was convinced that Stephenie was convinced she was Bella, and it was like it was a book that wasn't supposed to be published ... And you're like, reading her sort of sexual fantasy ... I was convinced that this woman is mad! She's completely mad, and she's in love with her own fictional creation," he said.

He told Vanity Fair that he didn't understand the relationship fans had with the series. "I guess people want it to define them, like 'I'm a 'Twilight' fan,'" he said. "That's crazy to me. I think people really just like being part of a crowd." Going further, he admitted to Moviefone that if he weren't the lead of the films, he would "mindlessly hate" them. Finally, when the franchise came to a close, Jimmy Fallon noted on "The Tonight Show" that the end of the saga was "heartbreaking" for millions of "Twilight" fans, asking if Pattinson agreed. He laughed, "For them!"

Back in 2012, Robert Pattinson sat down with Extra for a series of rapid-fire questions about his roles, his favorites, and his life in general. As with many R-Patz interviews, this one quickly got weird. The "Maps to the Stars" star seemed to be answering just to amuse himself and to make interviewer Terri Seymour laugh, volleying odd answers back just as quickly as the questions came at him. What quality does he "look for in a friend?" "Good looks." His least favorite thing about "being a vampire?" "Always being clean." Who would he want to swap lives with for 24 hours? "No one. ... I need as many days as I can! I need to change myself."

Seymour kept up with Pattinson for the most part, but she was thrown by his answer when she asked the actor, who once told Rotten Tomatoes that his favorite movies include "Corky Romano" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," to name his favorite chick flick. "I know you've seen a few," Seymour goaded him. The "Remember Me" star took a beat, and then answered, "'Chicken Run' is the only thing coming to my head." Shocked, Seymour asked, "What?!" It appeared that, yes, Robert Pattinson's favorite chick flick is a stop-motion animated film about actual chickens. A solid choice, if you ask us!

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting period of quarantine affected everyone in different ways. Some people tried to write novels; some baked sourdough bread; others got really into plants. Robert Pattinson, on the other hand, turned his eye to a new kind of entrepreneurship for the actor: inventing a brand-new, never-before-eaten form of cuisine.

Pattinson once told KTLA that his favorite food is "dino nuggets" cut to look like regular chicken nuggets, but in a GQ cover story, he explained a different culinary invention to a bewildered reporter. He envisioned a world where "pasta ... had the same kind of fast-food credentials as burgers and pizzas." More specifically, Pattinson said, "I was trying to think: How do you make a pasta which you can hold in your hand?" And thus the piccolini cuscino was born. The name means "little pillow," and Pattinson constructed his concoction out of crushed corn flakes, microwaved penne, sugar, pre-sliced cheese, the top of a hamburger bun, and sauce. Into the oven the whole thing went, wrapped in aluminum foil.

Except ... he didn't put it in the oven. He put it in a microwave. Which is a bad idea when aluminum foil is involved. "I literally did this yesterday. And now it's just impossible. It's going to look like I can't cook at all," he fretted. And then the microwave exploded. "The f***ing electricity," Pattinson exclaimed as he ducked on the ground. "Oh my God." The sacrifices this man is willing to make for his art!

Robert Pattinson has found his calling as an actor, but it seems that before he landed on this career, he tried his hand at a number of other money-making ventures. In particular, according to an anecdote he shared on "The Howard Stern Show," he ran his own miniature porn empire.

Pattinson recalled attending what he referred to as a "very, very strict school" before revealing that he had been expelled. Stern pressed him to admit to what had gotten him kicked out, and he confessed, "I was stealing porno magazines and selling them at school" for "a lot of money." He recounted how he had snuck into shops and slipped some sexy magazines into his bag, but he was careless: He wore his school uniform while committing theft. "At the end, I got so cocky that I would take the entire rack," he laughed. After he was caught, the owner of the store let him choose between calling his parents or the cops, but then he went and told Pattinson's school anyway. "Basically every single one of my friends had snitched on me," Pattinson remembered.

At least these days, he only plays criminals in the movies, and he's even given crimefighting a shot. But in true Pattinson fashion, "The Batman" star described his version of the heroic Dark Knight as "a weirdo" in an interview with GQ.

Robert Pattinson is known primarily as an actor, but the British heartthrob contributed to "Twilight" in more ways than just his on-screen performance: namely, through music. His track "Never Think" was included on the film's official soundtrack, but Pattinson told the Los Angeles Times that he didn't want people to get the wrong idea. "It looks like I'm trying to get a music career out of it or something," he protested, insisting, "I really didn't want it to look like I was trying to cash in. I hope it doesn't come across as that." However, Pattinson confessed, "Music is my backup plan if acting fails."

That's all well and good; plenty of actors also do music. However, not all actor/musicians have a past as colorful as Pattinson's evidently is. On "Late Night With Seth Meyers," Pattinson claimed that he used to want to be a rapper. "I still kinda do," he professed before diving into his history with the genre. He told the host that he used to be insecure about his weight, and so his alter ego, he said, was "Big Tub ... That was my rap name." Not just that, but "Big Tub and the Tabbycats." Meyers quipped, "Sounds like some real hardcore s****."

In the March 2022 issue of GQ, Robert Pattinson confessed to something that might explain his bizarre behavior in numerous interviews: He often lies, coming up with answers on the spot just to be able to say anything at all. In the same profile, he admitted that his struggle with truth-telling doesn't just come out when doing press and that he lies often in real life. The "High Life" star confessed to putting on various accents for fun, even fibbing about his home country during auditions. "I was doing an audition for 'Transformers 2,' right after 'Twilight' had come out and I went in as some guy from Denver. And they called my agent and were like, 'What's wrong with him? Why was he doing an improv? A really boring improv?'"

Pattinson has copped to this before. Back in 2014, Jimmy Kimmel asked him if it was true that he owns "a thousand suits," noting that when he had previously appeared on the show, "You told me ... that you make up a lot of lies for no reason." Pattinson corrected the host; he doesn't lie for no reason, he said. "Oh, no, it's panic. It's panic."