Robert Pattinson Reveals Agents' Hilarious Reaction To His Role In 'The Batman'

Robert Pattinson will forever be remembered for his role as Edward Cullen in the Twilight series. After the commercial success of the vampire love story series of movies, the British actor opted for projects that were not mainstream, for the longest time. He gained critical acclaim for his performances in independent films from auteur directors, like David Cronenberg's 2012 thriller Cosmopolis, James Gray's 2016 adventure drama The Lost City of Z, and the Safdie Brothers' 2017 crime drama Good Time, to name a few. 

He returned to mainstream films by starring in Christopher Nolan's 2020 spy film Tenet. He then landed the role of Batman in the reboot film. No one was more shocked than Pattinson's agent when he heard the 35-year-old wanted to play the caped crusader.

"I was aiming for quite different stuff," Pattinson told Total Film magazine about pursuing the role of Batman. "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." He had never really even auditioned for a comic book hero movie till he decided to chase after the role of Batman. "I just kept obsessively checking up on it for the next year or so," he said, sharing his agents' interesting reaction as well. "Even my agents were like, 'Oh, interesting. I thought you only wanted to play total freaks?' And I was like, 'He is a freak!'"

Pattinson, like other kids, had grown up reading about and being in awe of Batman. "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," he went on to say. "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." He also shared that even though people did not like some of the movies in the Batman franchise, he thinks "they’re not actually bad."

He praised these films and said, "They all kind of completely achieving 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." He is now carrying the legacy of the hero he looked up to as a child.

The Batman is directed by Matt Reeves, with a screenplay he wrote with Peter Craig. Pattinson will be joined by Zoë Kravitz as Catwoman, Paul Dano as the Riddler, along with Jeffrey Wright, John Turturro, Peter Sarsgaard, Andy Serkis, and Colin Farrell. "He’d heard that we were doing this and got excited about the idea that there was going to be another version of this character,” Reeves said of Pattinson to Esquire. "And so when I met him, and he read the script, we talked for a long, long time and I realized, 'This guy is a massive fan.'" He fit the part perfectly and after an audition, he landed the role.