Robert Pattinson joins the likes of Amabella from Big Little Lies and Forky from Toy Story 4 as a verifiable anxiety icon. After the news leaked that he maybe, just maybe might be playing a certain caped crusader, the actor flew from Cannes to Los Angeles in a fit of anxiety about losing the part. If that’s not all of us on a slow, sweaty subway ride into work, I just don’t know! In an interview with Variety, the actor explained how he finally landed the role of Batman and how he realized that a certain theme keeps popping up in his work.
Pattinson, who’s known to chase after directors he wants to work with, reached out to Matt Reeves before the Batman script had even been finished. “I sort of had an idea to do it, and I’d been prodding Matt,†Pattinson said. “He didn’t accept any prods.†Then, while in Cannes, reading over Batman scripts, the press leaked the news that he was being considered for the part. “When that thing leaked, I was f—ing furious,†Pattinson explained. “Everyone was so upset. Everyone was panicking from my team. I sort of thought that had blown up the whole thing.†Ultimately, it didn’t matter because it all came down to one thing: How did he feel in the Batsuit? “You do feel very powerful immediately,†he recalled. “And it’s pretty astonishing, something that is incredibly difficult to get into, so the ritual of getting into it is pretty humiliating. You’ve got five people trying to shove you into something. Once you’ve got it on, it’s like, ‘Yeah, I feel strong, I feel tough, even though I had to have someone squeezing my butt cheeks into the legs.’â€
Usually, he’s the only one doing the squeezing though. (So sorry.) “I keep masturbating,†Pattinson was “eager†to explain to Variety. “In the last three or four movies, I’ve got a masturbation scene. I did it in High Life. I did it in Damsel. And The Devil All the Time. I only realized when I did it the fourth time.†If three’s a pattern and No. 4 was masturbating to a clay mermaid statue in Robert Eggers’s “incredibly weird†movie The Lighthouse, then five has absolutely got to be his next project, Matt Reeves’s Batman film. Now that he’s officially going to be the Dark Knight, perhaps Reeves will add a scene that really brings Pattinson to a familiar place. You know what they say. Fifth time’s the charm.