Robert Pattinson Is Our Favorite Weird Little Guy

For those of us who can’t get enough of Robert Pattinson, Bong Joon-ho has heard our cries. In Mickey 17, we get multiple versions of RPattz as he plays many variations of the title character, an expendable grunt who is replaced with a clone every time he dies (usually in a horrible manner.) Dying over and over has left Mickey in a perpetual state of twitchy unease. He’s wearily embraced his terrifying status as a copy-pasted meat-sack made from recycled organic material, but that hasn’t made him any calmer or stronger. Meeting himself, the next clone who was meant to replace him, and finding that he’s maybe a bit of a psychopath doesn’t make his life much better.

Pattinson has racked up an impressive filmography full of fascinating directors who have allowed him to evolve into a striking character actor who specializes in weirdos, losers, and anxiety monsters. Bong, who has no problem with letting a hot Hollywood dude go feral (as evidenced by Jake Gyllenhaal in Okja), gives Pattinson free rein to explore Mickey’s existential panic. While Mickey 17 isn’t as fully realized as his masterpiece Parasite, it works because of Pattinson’s energy.

How lucky are we that Pattinson decided to be a weird little guy? Sure, we could get into the details of whether or not a man who is well over six foot tall can be accurately classified as a ‘weird little guy’ but I think RPattz has earned it. This is not stolen valour from our beloved short kings (shout out to DanRad and Kieran Culkin.) It’s an honour to be a WLG.

I’ve written before about how Pattinson’s acting abilities have often been met with skepticism or outright denial. As with his former Twilight co-star Kristen Stewart, there’s this sense of derision that surrounds their post-sparkle work, as though being in a critically mauled franchise means that everything they make in the ensuing decades must be viewed with caution. Even when he was announced as the new Batman, the usual suspects wailed that he couldn’t play the part because he was once Edward Cullen and couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag.

While it’s true that his performances in the Twilight films aren’t his finest work, it’d be wrong to say he’s outright terrible in them. Like Stewart, he was working with iffy material that swung wildly between soppy and deranged, and he was savvy enough to inject some knowing humour into a notoriously humourless character. His Edward is more obviously uneasy than romantic, a true weirdo who just so happens to have that pale pretty face (and painted-on abs.) The hints of the feral weirdo we’ve come to love are present in these dour, occasionally inexplicable movies. His reaction to smelling Bella’s blood for the first time feels more like something out of a John Waters movie than a teen romance. One can’t help but wonder what he would have done with the role had the books been less hindered by Stephenie Meyer’s creative and thematic limitations (imagine if that final book had gone full Clive Barker as it hints at during that childbirth scene.)

Kristen Stewart savvily took all of her Twilight money and spent years focusing on esoteric roles with indie filmmakers where she could stretch her acting muscles out of the mainstream gaze. Pattinson followed suit. He teamed up with David Cronenberg, Werner Herzog, and James Gray. He worked with Brady Corbet on his directorial debut and launched the Safdie brothers into the mainstream. Claire Denis used him for her English language feature debut. He was willing to be a supporting player for some scene-stealing roles. And throughout it all, he went full weirdo. Consider his work in The Lighthouse, where he meets Willem Dafoe beat for beat in terms of intensity and pitch-black comedy. In The King, David Michôd’s retelling of Shakespeare’s Henriad, Pattinson plays the smarmy and bratty French king with a go-for-broke obnoxiousness that makes his outrageous ‘Allo ‘Allo-esque French accent seem like one of his more subtle choices. He went Full Willem as the voice of the heron in the English dub of The Boy and the Heron.

It’s a proud tradition for a conventionally hot actor with matinee idol potential to decide that they want to be a bug-eyed character actor instead. Sebastian Stan is in this era right now and doing some of his finest work. With Pattinson, it’s easy to see the influences of actors like Willem Dafoe, his co-star in The Lighthouse and arguably his generation’s finest cinematic oddball. Being a weird little guy requires abandon. It’s not just the eagerness to do an odd accent, or the frequency with which he plays off-putting men: it’s that sense of liberation in his performances, that undeniable sense of balls-to-the-wall commitment with characters that reject notions of likeability (or even tolerability.) He has no qualms about embarrassing himself or playing the kinds of men that you spend your life trying to avoid.

And he does it all without embracing the expected ‘hot dude to serious artiste’ tropes. He doesn’t don a smothering mask of prosthetics or lose and gain a bunch of weight to ‘transform’ himself and distract from his attractiveness. In Mickey 17, he still has abs for days. But he also has a voice that can best be described as, ‘what if Natasha Lyonne cameoed on Ren & Stimpy?’ He squirms and guffaws like a Jackass player who’s trying to avoid being hit in the balls. He’s a sad sack, a believable one even though he’s Robert effing Pattinson. If he wasn’t an indie darling, he’d be a great party clown.

And none of this even gets into the long-term performance art that is the Pattinson interview. Watching Pattinson do interviews is like babysitting a devious toddler. He makes sh*t up to amuse himself, creating years-long urban legends that people are still debunking in 2025, then goes off on bananas tangents like the time he created his own microwave pasta dish.

Up next, Pattinson is reteaming with Christopher Nolan for his take on The Odyssey, and he has projects with Dream Scenario director Kristoffer Borgli and the iconic Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay (and also maybe a second Batman movie, but Team Pajiba has a lot of Feelings on whether or not that movie will ever happen.) These projects have a lot of weird guy potential, but it’s hard to predict, and that’s half the fun with Pattinson. What capital-C Choices will he make next? Whatever he goes for, we’re all in on the madness.