USA TODAY International Edition
Robert Pattinson ate ‘ a lot of mud’ for new film
The only thing weirder than Robert Pattinson’s new film might be the outrageous headlines it has inspired. ❚ “Robert Pattinson actually wet himself making ‘ The Lighthouse,’ ” Yahoo recently declared of the nautical psychodrama ( in theaters Friday in Ne
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. “... 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.
After critically hailed turns as a shifty bank robber ( 2017’ s “Good Time”) and captive astronaut ( last spring’s “High Life”), Pattinson, 33, wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty in “Lighthouse,” an R- rated black- andwhite film co- starring Willem Dafoe as a rollicking ex- sailor named Thomas who takes on Pattinson’s Ephraim as his assistant.
Set in the late 19th century, the dark comedy unfolds in a lighthouse with mystical powers on the rocky Atlantic coast. Living in close quarters, the incongruous duo start to unravel after Ephraim, in a fit of rage, unknowingly angers the sea gods and a storm traps them inside for days. Feeling claustrophobic and irked with each other, the men pass the time drinking, dancing and literally wrestling for power over their remote post. ( And that’s when Ephraim isn’t masturbating to a mermaid figurine, which plays a nightmarish role in his descent into madness.)
“It’s such a crazy script,” Pattinson says of “Lighthouse,” Eggers’ second feature film after 2015 breakout “The Witch.” Shooting on a rural inlet in Nova Scotia last year, “... there’s something kind of freeing when you’re just constantly covered in mud and soaking wet. There was a kind of anarchic energy.”
Dafoe, 64, remembers a particularly surreal day when one of their characters leads the other around on a leash outside and orders him to bark like a
JOEL C RYAN/ INVISION/ AP
dog.
“It was miserable,” Dafoe says. “My feet were all cut up, and it’s hard and it’s wet and it’s full of briars. You don’t sense quite how bad it is ( watching it).”
Save for the occasional weekend lobster boil, Pattinson and Dafoe rarely socialized during shooting – not because of any actual tension but because they were literally “barefoot, covered in mud and blood, there’s broken china on the floor, it smells like something died in there, and it’s freezing,” Eggers says. “What’s there to talk about?”
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,” the filmmaker says. There was one rainy day where “the rain wasn’t ( showing) in his closeup, so we were spraying him with a fire hose. At that moment, I could see he was like, ‘( Expletive) this, man.’ ”
Despite the taxing physical demands and Ephraim’s loose grip on sanity, Pattinson never feared for his own mental well- being while making “Lighthouse.”
“When someone’s going through their most psychologically tormented moment and you combine it with ( masturbating), there’s something so hilarious and perverse that you don’t see in movies,” he says.
The U. K. native, who next dons the cowl as Matt Reeves’ “The Batman” ( in theaters in 2021), even gets some of the film’s most laugh- out- loud funny lines, screaming, “I’m sick of your ( expletive) farts!” to Dafoe’s chronically flatulent character in a heated confrontation.
The gassy gibe has already been a hit with critics on Twitter, which Pattinson wouldn’t mind following him for the rest of his career.
“That’d be funny, wouldn’t it? Walking down the street and people yell, ‘ Your farts! Your farts!’ If that is my legacy, that would be a great one, for sure.”