Directors fawn over him. Girls scream for him. But Robert Pattinson can do without the A-list treatment – at least judging by the shoot for his new film, The Rover, a post-apocalyptic thriller he is starring in alongside Guy Pearce.

Shot in the Australian desert, there were no 30ft trailers and no five-star catering. ‘I was quite content to live off bread and barbecue sauce for two and a half months,’ he says. No, this wasn’t a new form of wacky diet, Pattinson just didn’t want food poisoning.

‘There were so many flies there… and I just didn’t want to eat fly s***.’

Thankfully, R-Patz has lived to tell the tale. Today we meet in the rather more salubrious surroundings of a posh London hotel. Dressed in denim, with stubble sprouting across his chin, he’s come equipped with sunglasses and a baseball cap, the two essential tools for evading prying eyes.


The previous day he promoted The Rover at London’s BFI Southbank. ‘90 per cent of the people outside were autograph sellers,’ he says. ‘I’m like: “You know these things aren’t worth anything.” I’ve signed so many.’

It’s a typically modest answer from Barnes-born Pattinson, whose career was launched playing Edward Cullen in Twilight but who seems uncomfortable with the fame it brought. The 28-year-old knows how much the vampire saga has overshadowed him.

‘People who’ve only seen Twilight… I don’t know what they think I am,’ he sighs. What he wants is credibility.

‘Rob fights to be seen as an actor rather than a movie star,’ said director Anton Corbijn when he worked with him on forthcoming film Life. ‘He is really trying to prove his worth.’

It’s why Pattinson took on The Rover, in which he plays Rey, a survivor in a world ten years on from a global economic collapse.

‘I’ve never worked so hard for an audition,’ he says of walking into the audition room ‘sort of in character’, even dressed for the part. ‘I was really obsessed with it.’

You can see why: Pattinson revelled in the isolation of shooting in the Outback. Ask him what he did for kicks on a Saturday night and all it took was a coin and a car. ‘You just put your foot down, go up to the next road, toss a coin and make a decision on where to go… I ended up in the middle of nowhere.’

That must be an appealing prospect when you’re used to being pursued by an army of fans and photographers. Pattinson has seemingly emerged unscathed, though, attributing it to having a good set of friends from his youth.

‘When your social life revolves around people you meet after you get famous, it gets a bit weird,’ he says. ‘Also, I’ve managed my life a bit better in the past few years.’

Moving out of the house he shared with Twilight co-star Kristen Stewart helped (they first split in 2012, after she cheated on him with director Rupert Sanders).

‘I had paparazzi outside my house every single day and it would drive me insane. It took me such a long time to realise: “This is driving you crazy, you really need to stop doing this.”’

Filming in exotic locations that take him out of the public eye looks to be part of Pattinson’s plan. He’s just played TE Lawrence – aka Lawrence of Arabia – in Queen Of The Desert with Nicole Kidman, which took him to Morocco.

Next he’s off to Colombia for The Lost City Of Z, starring as the assistant to famed British explorer Percy Fawcett, played by Sherlock’s Benedict Cumberbatch. ‘It’s going to be an impossible shoot,’ he says. Well, it will be if the fans of these two make it out to the jungle.



Film review: The Rover

Robert Pattinson playing a twitchy American simpleton is just one of this film’s many surprises. Director David Michôd’s follow-up to Animal Kingdom is a riveting crime thriller set in a post-apocalyptic Australian outback, where desperation and isolation have driven everyone slightly bonkers.

Our main man is Eric (Guy Pearce), who silently drives up to a ramshackle boozer. His car is stolen from outside. Pursuing the culprits, he will stop at nothing to get his beat-up banger back, including kidnapping their cohort, Rey (Pattinson).

Why so desperate for the car? That’s one of the many questions posed by this mysterious thriller, which offers an intriguing glimpse into a world without rules – or very few that can be enforced in rural Australia, at least. Michôd doesn’t spoon-feed the audience information about his dystopian culture, instead encouraging us to piece it together.

The result is an absorbing film with bags of atmosphere and shock value. We have little idea of what to expect from this world, which resembles our own but has an even darker heart.

Pearce is exceptional as a hardened man who is a mystery all on his own: enigmatic, monosyllabic, quick-witted, dejected… a loner whose few remaining principles are gradually revealed over the course of the film.

While Pearce is the undoubted star of the show, Pattinson more than holds his own as the stammering young man feeling increasingly abandoned by his brother (Scoot McNairy), who turns to the older man in his company. The Stockholm syndrome that sets in turns this into a bitterly one-sided bromance.

Also making a welcome appearance is Animal Kingdom’s Susan Prior as an independent woman who grudgingly takes in strangers in need, showing Rey the only tenderness he may have seen in a while.

It’s a bleak vision of a lawless society: something we’ve seen before, of course, but Michôd gives it a fresh spin with plenty of food for thought about society, humanity and the consequences of desperation.