Robert Pattinson is currently on his promotional tour for upcoming film Mickey 17, a science fiction movie from Oscar-winning filmmaker Bong Joon-ho. During one of his recent chats with GQ, the actor revealed that he's actually become too "sensitive" to watch horror movies! Considering Pattinson has starred in a few of them, that's surprising.
Per Variety, The Batman star revealed that he had to watch a horror movie recently before meeting with a director and the result left him quite shaken, to the point he had to go to sleep that night with knives beside him.
“I had to do a meeting with the director, and he’d done this horror movie, and I watched it, and I kept thinking that someone was breaking into my house," Pattinson recalls. "And so I was sitting on my sofa with two kitchen knives waiting for the person to come in. And then I fell asleep with them basically in my neck on the couch. It was probably a squirrel."
Out of all of the horror films Pattinson has starred in, the most notable is probably Robert Eggers' film The Lighthouse, but he's also been in High Life and The Devil All the Time. Even some of his fantasy films like Harry Potter and Twilight have certain horror elements in them, so he's no stranger to the world of genre film.
Still, those movies are admittedly much different from watching a tense slasher or home invasion flick. It sounds like that's what he might have been watching that made him have such a visceral reaction. Joon-ho points out that now Pattinson is a father, so perhaps everything feels different to him now that he has a son to consider. But Pattinson claims this newfound fear started even before he and his partner Suki Waterhouse welcomed a baby girl.
The actor explained that when he was a kid, he watched all kinds of dark stuff and thought it was cool, but as he gets older he's grown more weary of it.
“It’s strange, you’d think it would go the other way round. As you get older, you become less frightened of these [films]. I can’t watch horror movies anymore.”
I had the exact opposite experience of Pattinson. When I was kid I hated all things horror and would regularly cry when I saw Halloween masks on display at the store. The older I got, the more I began to appreciate the genre. It's interesting how so many of us have different reactions to film and just goes to show how important and influential art can be!
But as some fans have pointed out online, it's also possible that Pattinson is flat-out lying about the knives story and his experience. He's done it before, previously telling a story about seeing a clown die in an explosion and admitting that sometimes he just makes up stuff during interviews due to boredom. He's previously told other lies, too, like that he was once a woman's hand model and dining with a stalker.
His latest film, Mickey 17, is now playing in theaters.