Photo: Randy Holmes/Disney
“Robert is a liar. He lies,” Jimmy Kimmel announced in his March 16 conversation with Zendaya. The two were discussing the previous night’s Oscars in which Zendaya and her The Drama co-star, Robert Pattinson, presented Best Director. “He has oftentimes told me stories on television that he later told me he just made up,” Kimmel explains. There was a concern — perhaps — that if Pattinson read out the Best Director winner, he might just fabricate it. (Thankfully, nothing of that kind happened.) “The first time we hung out,” Zendaya corroborates, “that was one of the first things he said to me — ‘Yeah, I used to be a pathological liar.’”
Pattinson’s penchant for lying then came up yet again in the actor’s March 19 conversation with Kimmel. “I saw that,” Pattinson says with an air of panic. “I was like, What are you doing?” His nerves could be read one of two ways: Either he’s dismayed that the reputation of being a liar has hounded him (not likely, given how often he lies), or he doesn’t want the bit to be over. When Kimmel recounts the story of what Zendaya said about her first encounter with him, Pattinson echoes the phrase “used to be,” as if pathological lying is still very near and dear to his heart. “Why would you ever admit this about yourself?” Pattinson berates himself. “It’s such a stupid thing to say.”
It is a stupid thing to say — but not because of whatever knock on his character Pattinson could perceive this being. It’s that he doesn’t have to say it; in fact, he shouldn’t be saying it at all. He should keep lying through interviews as though this information was never made public. We all know he makes stuff up, the trail of receipts is longer than The Batman’s runtime. Kimmel and Pattinson proceed to run through a list of his past lies — whether or not he was living under an archway and trashcan lids in Venice (partially true), or if he owned a thousand suits. (“Could be,” Pattinson hedged, before he mentioned he’s having a hard time selling them on TheRealReal). It’s a good bit, and perhaps this will offer Pattinson the opportunity to start his next press tour for The Odyssey on a clean slate, but why do we need to know if this stuff is true?
What’s helped Pattinson remain an undeniable star over the past decade and change is that beyond his chameleonic skills, we really don’t know that much about him. He keeps his life relatively private, eschewing social media (though we get a vague sense of his goings-on from his longtime very online partner, Suki Waterhouse). That’s in part due to his penchant for wacky stories and larger-than-life tales. The more we’re distracted by the spectacle of Robert Pattinson the celebrity, the more we can appreciate Robert Pattinson the actor. In fact, it would probably be in the best interest for a lot of people in the industry to start lying at the rate Pattinson has been doing for the length of his career. The less we know — or the less we know for certain — the more we can appreciate these big, beautiful faces on the big screen. The lies are just as, if not more satisfying than whatever mundane truth Pattinson would otherwise tell. So let him say that he gained 200 pounds of muscle for The Odyssey or that he learned an alien language for Dune: Part Three by speaking it to his baby daughter. (Okay, I’m spitballing here, but these are two solid ones.) Or maybe just something mundane, like when he and Zendaya sat down to talk to Jimmy Fallon, Pattinson immediately told a story about Zendaya that she denied and went into a panic over a phone call no one can remember for sure the veracity of. Press tours are often thankless, if not an exercise in forced fun.
Pattinson’s dedication to keeping himself amused has kept The Drama’s press tour light and airy amid scandal and uncertainty. The actor runs loops around his co-stars in promotional gambits like giving relationship advice, wherein he plays contrarian for the fun of it. When his co-stars announce a woman who hasn’t met her partner of three years’ family, he thinks the partner should dump her for making too big a deal about it, and he advises a woman who doesn’t like the bride in a wedding in which she’s agreed to be the bridesmaid to go anyway. “You never know who you’re gonna meet,” he teases, even though it had nothing to do with her initial quandary. “You’re crazy,” co-star Mamoudou Athie tells him, but Pattinson doubles down even more. It’s that kind of commitment to the bit — his flagrant enthusiasm for being anything other than conventional (and in turn, coming off way more normal, or at least … like your craziest friend on their best day) is much of what’s fun about watching him on the big screen too.
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