Robert Pattinson has opened up about his audition for Michael Bay’s action movie Transformers 2 and admitted to making an embarrassing mistake. In an interview with GQ, The Batman star shared that there were occasionally concerns around his English accent when he first started acting.
To try and deal with the situation, he started putting on an American accent during auditions. A genius idea, in theory, but a problematic one when people already knew that he was English. Say right after he’d just starred in one of the biggest teen movies ever, like, oh, I don’t know Twilight?
“I used to always come in as a different person, an American. I’d say, ‘Hi, I’m from Michigan,'” he explained. “But then I was doing an audition for Transformers 2, right after Twilight had come out. I went in as some guy from Denver. And they called my agent and were like, ‘What’s wrong with him? Why was he doing an improv? A really boring improv?'”
After the Transformers incident, Pattinson stuck to auditioning as himself, something that seems to have worked in his favour these past few years.
The former vampire is, of course, playing Bruce Wayne in Matt Reeves reinterpretation of the DCEU legend but Pattinson has enjoyed a storied career since the teen horror movies that made his name.
He appeared in David Cronenberg’s thriller movie Cosmopolis, the Safdie brother’s incredible crime flick Good Boys, and my personal favourite, Robert Eggers’ psychological horror The Lighthouse. Of all those, he’s worked with though Pattinson apparently felt the most kinship with the Safdies.
“They’re very kind of anarchic,” he told GQ. “But it’s not out of control at all. They’re some of the only directors I’ve worked with who thrive on the chaos but where they’re also always just in control of the car.”
The Batman broods into theatres on March 4.