The Huge Role That Robert Pattinson Regrets Taking

In addition to being cinema's next Caped Crusader, one of our biggest bona fide movie stars, and the subject of the best FKA twigs song, Robert Pattinson has proven to rank among the most skilled and adventurous actors of his generation. Starting with the lead role in David Cronenberg's experimental anti-capitalist screed Cosmopolis, the star of The Batman spent the 2010s racking up a list of credits to make any arthouse-minded performer green with envy.

Just for starters, the leading roles in projects from renowned auteurs like Cronenberg, Werner Herzog, Anton Corbijn, Antonio Campos, and Christopher Nolan would be enough to mark Pattinson down as an arthouse "it" boy. Then there's the fact that he's starred in many of the decade's most acclaimed films, from Brady Corbet's ambitious historical drama The Childhood of a Leader to Robert Eggers' one-of-a-kind horror fantasy The Lighthouse, from the Safdie brothers' gritty indie darling Good Time to the Zellner brothers' deconstructed neo-western Damsel, from James Gray's underrated Amazon adventure The Lost City of Z to the great Claire Denis' psychosexual space freakout High Life. Each of those roles displayed a stunning degree of versatility and dedication to the craft, and several of them even earned Pattinson multiple awards, most notably Good Time and The Lighthouse. It's hard to imagine him having any regrets about such a winning career.

And yet, there is one movie role Pattinson used to be very vocal about hating, to the point where his disavowal of it became a meme. As is often the case, it's the very role that made him a superstar, and one from which he went to great lengths to dissociate from.

The Twilight saga was an enormous commercial success, turning its three leads — Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, and Taylor Lautner — into the hottest movie stars in the world. But that hasn't stopped Pattinson from openly mocking Twilight's plot holes, logical leaps, bizarre character motivations, and corny aesthetics, calling the character of Edward Cullen an "axe murderer" (via MTV), wondering why on Earth the Cullens would remain in high school after a hundred years (via KVPR), and summing up the series' sweeping romance (via Evening Standard) as the story of "this guy, and he finds the one girl he wants to be with, and also wants to eat her. I mean, not eat her, but drink her blood or whatever."

Even during his Twilight tenure, Pattinson was salty about the movies in a way that must be seen to be believed. He famously once told Moviefone that, if he weren't in Twilight, he would "just mindlessly hate it." When WOIO asked him if he would take anything from the Breaking Dawn – Part 2 set with him to remember the experience, he answered "My dignity." And when Jimmy Fallon pointed out in 2012 that, "Millions of Twilight fans out there just cannot wait to see this. It's almost heartbreaking because they don't want it to be over. It's a little bittersweet, isn't it?" Pattinson's response was a hearty "For them!" followed by guffaws.

Pattinson's disdain for Twilight became a widespread meme, with a whole Tumblr dedicated to recording it for posterity. But, in recent years, with Twilight overcoming its internet-punching-bag reputation and enjoying something of a renaissance, Pattinson seems to have mellowed on the teen vampire flicks. As he told USA Today in 2019, "It's lovely now that the mania is not so intense. People come up [to me] and just have very fond memories of it. It's a really sweet thing. I think the only scary part was right in the thick of it all, when it was very, very intense. Now the intensity has died down and it's just very warm memories."