Robert Pattinson is about to join Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Christian Bale, Ben Affleck, and the late Adam West in the club of actors who portrayed Batman on the big screen. While some are happy for Robert, 33, some comic book fans voiced their outrage when the former Twilight heartthrob was cast as the next Dark Knight. “To be honest, it was less vitriolic than I was expecting,” he said to our sister publication Variety, speaking for the first time since being anointed the next Dark Knight. This surprisingly upbeat reaction to the hate – there was a Change.org petition demanding Warner Brothers drop Robert – is proof that Robert is not worried about his haters. “It’s much more fun when you’re an underdog. There’s no expectation of you,” he added.
If those fans knew how much Robert loved Batman, they might perhaps give him a break. Robert grew up watching the Tim Burton Batman movies and even dressed up as the Caped Crusader. “When I was a kid, it was the only outfit that I had,” he said while refusing to disclose where he used to wear his Batman costume. “If I actually said it in an interview, I would definitely have a lot of abuse afterwards,” he said before an outburst of “nervous laughter,” per Variety. “If I successfully play the character, I can say it at the end.”
Robert has a brand new Batman costume to wear at odd places. After attending the Cannes screening of The Lighthouse, Robert flew back to Los Angeles to try on the Batsuit for the final phase of the audition process. “It’s maybe the craziest thing I’ve ever done in terms of movie stuff,” he said. “I put it on. I remember saying to [director Matt Reeves], ‘It does feel quite transformative!’ He was like, ‘I would hope it does! You’re literally in the Batsuit.’ … You do feel very powerful immediately. And it’s pretty astonishing, something that is incredibly difficult to get into, so the ritual of getting into it is pretty humiliating. You’ve got five people trying to shove you into something. Once you’ve got it on, it’s like, ‘Yeah, I feel strong, I feel tough, even though I had to have someone squeezing my butt cheeks into the legs.’ ”
It turns out that Robert has been angling to play Batman for longer than we knew. “I’d had Batman in my mind for a while,” Robert told Variety. “I was absolutely relieved when Matt called [to tell him he got the part.]” He was on the set of Tenet, the new film by the Dark Knight trilogy director Christopher Nolan. “It’s so bizarre. I was like, ‘What a coincidence this is happening. It’s absolutely crazy.”