Do you ever just stop and think about how weird it is that a comic book vigilante who dresses like a goth bat has the film industry in a chokehold? Like, the Bruce Wayne/Batman character is notably and undeniably WEIRD. He’s a rich, damaged misanthrope who can’t function in society, so he decides to dress up in a bat costume and beat up criminals. It’s so random. If there’s one actor who can properly bring the Freaks Come Out At Night vibe of Batman, it’s Robert Pattinson. I actually trust him to bring the weirdness. According to Rob, he’s always known that Batman is a freak.

Why he auditioned for Batman: “I was aiming for quite different stuff. Obviously it’s basically the jewel in the crown, of the parts you can really get as an actor. But I’d never really thought I was anywhere close to doing it, and especially with the other parts I was attracted to at the time. I just kept obsessively checking up on it for the next year or so. Even my agents were like, ‘Oh, interesting. I thought you only wanted to play total freaks?’ And I was like, ‘He is a freak!'”

He’s always loved the Batdude: “Out of all the comic-book characters and that kind of movie, I’ve seen every single one of the [Batman] movies in the cinema, which I can’t really say I’ve done for any other series. I was always really looking forward to them coming out. There was the combination of just being so attracted to it, but also feeling like it’d had a lot of movies made about it, and none of them are bad movies. People kind of sh-t on some of them, but they’re not actually bad. They all kind of completely achieve what they set out to achieve, and they’re all really interesting, according to their time and place. I don’t know. I just had a weird instinct about it. But I’ve always loved the character.”

Rob says ‘The Batman’ won’t dwell on the character’s origins story: “He’s got this enormous trauma inside him, and he’s built this intricate, psychological mechanism to handle it. It’s like a really, really, really bad self-therapy, which has ended up with him being Batman at the end, as self-help.”

[From Games Radar]

As someone who has followed Rob’s career since Twilight, I enjoy the fact that this was the project he truly pursued. Years ago, he would not have been so bold. He would have convinced himself that other actors should take the role, that other actors could do it better. The role opened up for him at just the right time in his life and his career, when he was ready to do something bigger and more involved. I never would have thought that the sparkly vampire would end up playing a masked vigilante, but here we are. I’m looking forward to it, and I hope Rob got his way and made Batman a total freak.

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Photos courtesy of Backgrid, covers & IG courtesy of Total Film.