Loving all these new Rob interviews. Here's another, this time with 'The Irish Times'
Robert Pattinson is gleaming just as surely as his odd little golden splodge of hair at the front. Today that blond bit is made especially visible by a close crew cut. He’s in strikingly chipper form. I’m not sure I was expecting chipper.
Having worked with Werner Herzog, David Cronenberg, Anton Corbijn and, as we meet, Claire Denis, Pattinson has blossomed into the one of the most interesting actors of his generation. Still, he has never been the kind of performer you’d confuse with such great, boozy, storytelling carousers as Peter O’Toole.
“How did those guys do it?” Pattinson says. “It’s the most amazing thing. How can you operate at that level while simultaneously sabotaging yourself? Have you read that Andre Agassi biography? I can’t get over it. So he was still seeded. Around 30th in the world, I think. And he was addicted to crystal meth. And he’s also gluing his wig to his head with polymer cement. So he’s playing a five-set tennis match. On meth. With a wig cemented to his head. How crazy is that?” He laughs. “I mean, I can’t do anything if I’m slightly tired. Or if I’ve drunk two cups of coffee. After two cups of coffee I’m literally incapacitated.”
When we last caught up the artist formerly known as R-Patz was shooting The Lost City of Z in Belfast and had just been declared a total ledge by the media after dropping in on a Co Down wedding reception. He had a great time, he says.
“But the best thing about Ireland was seeing Van Morrison play in Cypress Avenue,” Pattison says. “It was my birthday, and he was incredible. I’m a bit obsessed with Van Morrison. I’ve seen him seven times, and twice he has really, really killed it. But that was really something. Just amazing.”
The same production would bring Pattinson to the caiman- and viper-infested waters of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, where, in a fit of method madness, he ate live maggots from his beard. “I can’t believe they deleted that scene,” he says.
Did they? Did they really? This isn’t one of those patented Pattinson tall tales, is it? Like the time he claimed to have extraordinarily heavy saliva? Or the time he told the Today show that he saw a clown’s car explode at his first circus? Or how about last summer, when he told Jimmy Kimmel that he refused to masturbate a dog for his new thriller, Good Time? “Robert Pattinson is our kind of guy (and everyone’s who has a heart) for refusing to masturbate a dog,” said Lisa Lange of the animal-welfare group Peta, in a laudatory statement.
Except, no. The dog masturbation was also a fib.
“No, there were real live maggots,” he says, grinning.
We’ll leave it at that.