Robert Pattinson on His Iconic Characters and How He Got Almost Fired From “Twilight”

Robert Pattinson, an actor we are all waiting to see in a role of Bruce Wayne in Matt Reeves’s The Batman, rose to his fame with his performance of Cedric Diggory in The Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire.

Robert is reminiscing about his part as the leader of the Hufflepuff clan, while mostly making fun of his wrong perception of what the acting was and his ineffective methods. For the GQ, he says:

“I think I read a book on method acting. The only thing I really got out of it was beating yourself up before every single scene. That was basically my only concept for how to prepare for a scene. I was psyching myself up as if I was getting into a fight or something and just screaming into a pillow and fighting, punching myself and ripping my clothing.”

He’s remembering how dorky he thought holding the magic wand was, so he held it like a gun, with both of his hands – thinking it would make him look like he was in a Die Hard. Pattinson added that he lived off The Harry Potter money for quite a while before getting his iconic role of Edward Cullen in Twilight, which he was terrified to audition for, but passed it nonetheless.

Pattinson was 21 at the time and says he wanted to make his performance as “artsy as possible” which was not in accordance with what studio wanted, as they were afraid to make things too “emo”. Pattinson cannot believe the way his was acting in the movie, but is sure it had something to do with being 21 – which made him act infuriated most of the time. This method almost cost him a job:

“My agent and my manager came as a surprise visit and then at the lunch they were like: ‘Okay, so whatever you’re doing right now, after lunch, just do the opposite, or you’ll be fired by the end of the day.'”

He laughs about it now, but admits this was the only thing that got to him and made his Edward Cullen smile more.

Pattinson definitely perfected his acting methods from his younger days, as we saw in his brilliant role in The Lighthouse, in which he indubitably proved his great skills as an actor. Now he raised our expectations and we are expecting only the best, top notch performance in his role of Bruce Wayne.