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Robert Pattinson seems to be kind of everywhere this year. Undoubtedly making up for time lost during lockdown, he’s back on the public radar with a vengeance and spent much of this year talking to various publications about his role in the recent Batman movie.
Inevitably thrown off-kilter by the pandemic, production on the film was halted on a number of different occasions and between Covid outbreaks, travel restrictions and closed theatres, it wasn’t long before the blockbuster’s original premiere date was pushed out from October 1 2021.
Filming finally wrapped on the project last September, and it’s pretty much been a waiting game since then but things got back on track this year when the movie got its long-awaited cinematic release on March 4. Which explains Rob’s return to the spotlight. Very much the man of the hour, everyone was eager to hear what he had to say… but I don’t think any of us were ready for what he actually did say. Namely, that he likes to lie when interviewed – which explains quite a lot, actually.
Admitting that he’s been known to occasionally “just make something up in an interview, in order to say anything at all”, the actor has us questioning which of the many (many) bizarre things he’s said in the past are true… if any?! He is, as a recent GQ profile on him puts it, “one of those authentically weird, boundlessly energetic, deceptively chaotic creative types”.
The GQ interview – it’s always GQ – he did where he made a bowl of pasta (and subsequently blew his microwave up) is possibly one of the best things I’ve ever read. Ever. In my whole life. The ensuing Repeller article which details Edith Young’s attempt at Pattinson’s recipe (the one where you “congeal everything in an enormous amount of sugar and cheese”) is a close second. If you haven’t read either, then I implore you to do so immediately. Your life will improve exponentially. Best of all? This is not one of the falsities that the actor previously spoke of and writer Zach Baron actually saw him do all of this on Zoom. Oh, to have been a fly on that camera…
Back to the lying though. Unsurprisingly, things usually come back to bite him in the behind, so fibbing may seem like a great idea at the time but it’s rarely proven to be such a clever out after the fact. For instance, Pattinson told Extra that he “didn’t really see the point in washing your hair” back in 2009. “It’s like, I don’t clean my apartment ’cause I don’t care. I have my apartment for sleeping in and I have my hair for just, you know, hanging out on my head. I don’t care if it’s clean or not,” he said way back when.
13 years later and that statement still haunts him. Google the phrase “Robert Pattinson doesn’t wash his hair” and pages upon pages of headlines return – one of which dates back to 2014 and simply states “Robert Pattinson is bathing now”.
What about the time he told Metro that he got rid of his stalker by taking her out to dinner? Here’s his recollection of events: “I had a stalker while filming a movie in Spain last year. She stood outside of my apartment every day for weeks – all day every day. I was so bored and lonely that I went out and had dinner with her. I just complained about everything in my life and she never came back. People get bored of me in, like, two minutes,” he claimed. Is this true? Maybe, maybe not. Probably not though, right?
During the Water for Elephants press tour, Pattinson told Matt Lauer (on live TV!) that he had quite a troubled relationship with the circus due to a traumatic clown-car-explosion incident he witnessed as a child. Asked if he had ever dreamed of running away to the circus, he responded by saying no, later elaborating and adding, “The first time I went to see the circus, somebody died. One of the clowns died.” “How did he die?” Lauer questioned, genuinely surprised by the revelation. “His little car exploded,” Rob replied. “The joke car exploded on him.”
Was Pattinson serious, Lauer probed? Well, yes, of course! Or that’s what he let on anyway, doubling down on his story and filling in further details about the horrific event. “Seriously. Yeah. My parents had to – everybody ran out. It was terrifying. It was the only time I’ve ever been to the circus.” The Today Show ran the excerpt along with the headline, “For Robert Pattinson, circuses are scarier than vampires.”
One week later, a German journalist followed up on the story, and Pattinson admitted that he made it all up. “I said those things. But I actually made the whole thing up,” he said. “It’s coming back to haunt me. I said it on some show. It was really early in the morning the day after the New York premiere. Someone asked me what my experience with the circus was and I was like, I have nothing interesting to say. I don’t know why I said that!” Sorry, but… what?!
More recently, he claimed that he wasn’t working out to prep for his Batman role. This from the man stepping up to play a character once embodied by Christian Bale who trained six times a week, often for three hours at a time. I can’t say I ever really bought that one, but then again… Robert Pattinson exudes chaos, maybe he was taking a stand and really wasn’t going to workout as a statement against unattainable body stereotypes.
Other tales he’s told include: that he used to be a hand model (Joey Tribbiani could never), that he was a drug dealer in high school who imported substances in floppy discs, that he was expelled from his first prep school for peddling porn, that he’s a fake furniture designer who makes tiny chairs out of clay, takes pictures of them and then sends them to a designer he knows who helps build them, and that he thinks “Batman has sort of [a] piratey type voice”.
Why does he do it? Partly for lack of anything else to say, and partly because old habits die hard. But really, his penchant for lying started back in his early audition days when he’d “come in as a different person, an American” to reassure casting directors put off by his English accent.
Pattinson isn’t the only celebrity to lie though. Granted, his are definitely more far-fetched than other stories we’ve heard, but expecting famous people to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in every interview they do is probably a bit naive. In fact, the above made me think of another interview in which our very own Niall Horan admitted that he and his former One Direction bandmates often used to make things up to entertain themselves too.
“Anytime you watch interviews of us, you’d always see me and Louis giggling or something,” the Mullingar native told SiriusXM. “And it was just because we’d be making up how to answer the next question.” Knowing that there was always huge interest in their love lives, Louis took it upon himself to start the rumour that Nialler was going out with Carly Rae Jepsen. Which was news to us but was supposedly news to Horan too.
“Me and Niall always used to have a laugh in interviews,” Louis explained. “I could always get away with stuff like that with Niall. Because naturally, you know, people are going to write stories about this so some of the boys might have been a little bit annoyed about that but Niall was always a good sport in that situation. I used to connect him to loads of different people, make up loads of bullsh*t for the press just because we could, it was fun you know”
So, forgive us for really thinking that Robert Pattinson doesn’t wash his hair or once had dinner with his stalker. Stranger things have happened! Even still, we all believed exactly what he said… so the joke is very much on us.