‘I did eat quite a lot of mud’ making new film, says Robert Pattinson
The only thing weirder than Robert Pattinson’s new film might be the outrageous headlines it’s inspired.
“Robert Pattinson actually wet himself making ‘The Lighthouse,’ ” Yahoo recently declared of the nautical psychodrama, opening Thursday in Chicago. Similarly unusual reports of him eating mud, getting blackout drunk and nearly punching writer-director Robert Eggers on the set quickly made the rounds on social media.
But the “Twilight” actor insists most of that behavior was wildly exaggerated or taken out of context from his conversations with Esquire and Interview Magazine.
“I didn’t actually get drunk — that would’ve been absolutely impossible,” Pattinson says with a laugh. “I can easily whip myself up to be way more out of control sober, because if I was drunk, I’d just be chuckling to myself.”
“Peeing myself was another exaggeration,” he adds, “but I did eat quite a lot of mud,” rolling around and licking up puddles as he tapped into his unhinged character.
Pattinson wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty in “Lighthouse,” an R-rated blackand-white film co-starring Willem Dafoe as a rollicking ex-sailor named Thomas, who takes on Pattinson’s Ephraim as his assistant.
As for that supposed dust-up with Pattinson, there wasn’t one: “He’s a professional — he’s not going to threaten to punch me or anything,” Eggers says. There was one rainy day during the shoot where “the rain wasn’t [showing] in his close-up, so we were spraying him with a fire hose. At that moment, I could see he was like, ‘F—- this, man.’ “