How Twilight star Robert Pattinson went undercover for Good Time to shoot his grittiest role yet
Exchanging fake prison correspondence and scuffling with one of the directors wasn’t enough for Pattinson, who also befriended ex-convicts and spoke to Manhattan prison guards for new film directed by Josh and Benny Safdie
Blonds don’t always have more fun.
Robert Pattinson learned that the hard way when he bleached his famously coiffed mop to play the amoral Connie Nikas, a greasy New York thug who haphazardly robs a bank and tries to spring his brother out of prison in Good Time.
“It was pretty gross. I thought I was going to look a lot trendier than I did,” Pattinson laments. After months of alternating between a dyed black perm and a hydrogen peroxide-lightened hairdo, he says “your hair is no longer hair. It’s just strands of chemicals.”
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Pattinson now has his messy locks tucked inside a backward baseball cap as he picks at a salad (“Too much lemon!”) in the courtyard of Manhattan’s Bowery Hotel. Quaffing water and coffee (“I’m a compulsive sipper”), he’s soft-spoken yet waggish when talking about Good Time, which earned him career-best reviews when the pulpy crime thriller premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this summer. It will be released today in cinemas in New York and Los Angeles, opening in Hong Kong in September.
Pattinson, 31, became an international heartthrob playing vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight franchise. He veered into more ambitious fare when the series wrapped in 2012, working with auteurs James Gray (The Lost City of Z), David Cronenberg (Cosmopolis) and Werner Herzog (Queen of the Desert).
I don’t ever watch a movie and think, ‘Oh, I can really sympathise with that guy.’ I don’t give a s***. If someone’s not interesting, I just don’t care
He emailed sibling filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie, the directors of Good Time, after seeing an image of their 2014 drama Heaven Knows What online and met with them in Los Angeles months before the script for Good Time was even written.