Robert Pattinson: The Scotsman interview

Robert Pattinson was interviewed by the Scotsman last summer when he was attending the Cannes Film Festival. In this interview, Robert talked about how his life has changed over the past year and how he is coping so far. He also talked about his parents reaction to his fame and how will he react once people will get tired of him and he is no longer the “it” boy of Hollywood. Here is an excerpt of his interview:

Even by the standards of Pattinson’s last year, which has seen him go from a relative unknown to a massive star, this is something else. “It’s embarrassing, doing interviews,” he confides when he sits down in another chair out of view and the cries subside. “I’ve never really done this before – people screaming in the background. Except at a premiere.” You’d think he’d be used to the attention by now. Even before Twilight was released, taking nearly 400 million in cinemas around the world, girls were leaving notes under the windscreen wipers of his car. By the time he toured a series of shopping malls to promote the film, it had morphed into something akin to Beatlemania as girls fainted, screamed and asked him to bite them. Not even Brad Pitt gets that kind of attention.

Admittedly, this sort of adulation was always on the cards. Stephenie Meyer’s quartet of Twilight books has already proved a literary sensation to rival JK Rowling’s Harry Potter franchise. The most recent book, Breaking Dawn, sold a staggering 1.3 million copies on its first day of publication. And with the novels primarily aimed at teenage girls, it’s Pattinson – who plays Edward Cullen, the impossibly handsome vampire from a family of neck-biters – who attracts most of the fans. His co-star Kristen Stewart – who plays Bella Swan, the mortal Edward falls for – must be relieved. “You do tend to start getting a little bit paranoid about stuff,” Pattinson confesses, shrinking further into his chair, “looking around when you’re walking down the street, in case you get mobbed by teenage girls!”

It explains why this gawky boy from Barnes has been on the move – hanging out in Vancouver, New York and Argentina this year after spending much of 2008 in Los Angeles. “I quite like it,” he says of the city. “I like the isolation of it in a way. If you want to be alone, you’re really alone in LA – apart from people following you around with cameras.” The thing is, Pattinson gets this everywhere he goes now. He tells me that his sister was in the States recently, and noticed just how insane it’s got. “She sent me a text saying ‘It’s just ridiculous how famous you are.’ It’s not even the same in the UK. It’s weird. In magazines in America, I’m in there every week – even if I didn’t do anything.”

The intrusions on his privacy notwithstanding, it’s the most basic life experiences that have changed for him. “Just the most obvious thing, like walking into a room where people know you before you’ve introduced yourself,” he says. “However simple it sounds, it’s the most bizarre experience. So many people have watched Twilight or heard about it, you can be sitting anywhere and the chances are someone will come up and recognise you.” He can’t even go to a sandwich shop in a small town like Guisborough, in Yorkshire, without being accosted by a fan brandishing a camera. “How can you have immediate recognition in Guisborough, coming out of a Benjys!” he says, his head shaking in disbelief. “That was very strange!”

The trouble is, as articulate as Pattinson is (as when he talks enthusiastically about his recent role as surrealist painter Salvador Dalí in the low-budget drama Little Ashes), it’s hard to talk to him about anything else but fame. It seems so much a part of his life right now, like a huge wild animal that’s taken up residence in his garden and refuses to move. While he’ll tell you that things haven’t “really changed so much in my head” since Twilight came out, he carries the bewildered air of someone who still can’t quite believe what’s happened to him. “It was driving me a little bit nuts a couple of months ago,” he says. “But you just learn to deal with it.”

To read the rest of the interview, click on the link above.

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