Robert Pattinson Pyschosexually Analyzed Twilight’s Edward Cullen
“I think Edward basically is Nosferatu. But at the same time, he still cares about, like, doing his hair and stuff.”
Robert Pattinson has been on quite the press tour. The actor is promoting his latest delightfully unhinged film, The Lighthouse, and the interviews have taken a turn for the bizzare. Last night, Pattinson stopped by Late Night with Seth Meyers, where Meyers asked him how he passed the time while filming in a small Nova Scotia fishing village. And he had a really interesting answer: he filled his days by reading Yelp reviews of local sex stores.
“There were two pretty highly frequented sex shops,” said Pattinson. “I’d sort of pass the time by looking at Yelp reviews, and so many people used to write these Yelp reviews. And this was a town of maybe 400 people. Well maybe a little more than 400, but I could meet these people in the local shop if I wanted to!”
This is the only interesting way anyone has used Yelp, ever. We hope their marketing department sent him a really expensive fruit basket.
Pattinson also hit NPR’s Fresh Air, where he gave a fascinating interview to the legendary Terry Gross. Gross asked him for his “psychosexual analysis” of his Twilight character, Edward Cullen, towards whom Pattinson has previously shown a famed distaste (we’ll take any excuse to rewatch that video compilation featuring his relentless mockery of the Twilight franchise).
“Every character I play has some self-doubt issue,” he replied. “But I thought when he falls in love with Bella, it makes him feel weaker and weaker and weaker. And he—and she becomes this kind of enormous kind of—that she becomes his fantasy figure, and that’s what’s terrifying him, is making him feel weaker and weaker.”
Pattinson went on to explain that he was “very, very obsessed” with watching Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution while he was filming the first Twilight, and that the film inspired him to magnify small gestures between Edward and Kristen Stewart’s Bella.
“I mean, I wanted them to only touch, like, three times in the entire movie and… then those three times are so sort of electrifying that it’s painful to them,” he continued. “It’s not a particularly pleasurable thing, how much they’re attracted to each other. It’s just—it’s almost traumatic, which is kind of probably how I felt about all my teenage relationships.”
Gross then referenced Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, a notoriously dark film about a version of Dracula going through an existential depression. (Pattinson worked with the director on 2015’s Queen of the Desert) “I think Edward basically is Nosferatu,” Pattinson quipped. “But at the same time, he still cares about, like, doing his hair and stuff.”
