Robert Pattinson is still promoting Cosmopolis, which is getting a wide release in the UK this weekend although we won’t see it stateside until August 17. As this press tour continues, it seems that Sparkles is getting a little bit punchier with each interview even though he’s still (so far) managing to keep his vital, self-deprecating air about himself. In this interview with The Guardian, he discusses how he feels like everyone hates him and how he’s obsessed with Googling himself and reading critical responses to his acting. Sparkles also takes a shot at the celebrities who muck up the Occupy movement by showing up in their fancy cars, which reminds me of how Kanye West showed up to Occupy Wall Street wearing a $30,000 outfit. Oh, and he really hates being called “R-Patz” too but never mentions anything about “Sparkles,” so I think we’re still safe with that moniker. Here are some excerpts:

On self-doubt: “I don’t really know how accepted I am. Nothing ever matters to me apart from the people with negative opinions. That’s literally it. That always drives me on to the next thing. It’s funny, you just focus on them and then the next movie. That’s the only thing you’re thinking about when it comes out. I’ve never really taken myself seriously as an actor,” he says, fresh off a plane from Germany, where, he notes by the by, everybody seems to hate him. “It is surprising the amount of people who think I’m going to be really dumb. I think they think anyone who has done teen movies is just an idiot. I don’t know, maybe I am. Some of the best actors, if you talk to them, they’re not the smartest people in the world.”

On celebrity hypocrisy w/the Occupy movement: “I remember when Occupy happened in LA. I knew a bunch of actors who went down to it. They all drove down there, because no one takes the train, and parked one stop away, because they didn’t want to be seen driving their free Audis, and then got on the train. I was like, ‘What are you doing? You’re probably ruining it for the other people!’ I guess that’s kind of a bubble; you want to say things, but you are being hypocritical. I’ve never really been in a position to give my opinion on political stuff before, it doesn’t really come up. But suddenly you’ve got to take an enormous amount of responsibility.”

On Cosmopolis: “It’s funny. It got such divisive reactions in Cannes,” Pattinson says, before confessing to having compulsively sought out those reactions himself. “I was sitting in the car on the way back from the press conference, refreshing, refreshing, refreshing on my phone. I’ve never really done anything where people have hated it, or really, really read into it. It’s so different to other films, and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to do it. You read the script and you’re like, ‘Is this actually getting made? It’s set in a car, there’s so much talking about experimental economics, and it’s getting a wide release? But I think that’s important, I would do a lot to get movies like that into the cinema again.”

On his dreaded nickname: “When I got this part, every single article that came out, was, ‘R-Patz’s struggle for credibility!’; I don’t understand who invented that thing, ‘R-Patz’, I want to strangle them.”

[From The Guardian]

The part about the nickname is kind of funny, I think, and it’s a lot like Scarlett Johansson’s distaste at being called “ScarJo.” At a certain point, it’s kind of ridiculous when a celebrity earns several million dollars per movie and then focuses their annoyance on something as harmless and tiny as a nickname. It’s not like people are calling him “TinyWang” or anything, right? In that regard, Sparkles just needs to suck it up. There are much worse things to be called than “R-Patz.”

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet and WENN