ROBERT PATTINSON GOES DARK FOR ‘GOOD TIME’
His latest role is blond and gritty, and it doesn’t suck
Blonds don’t always have more fun.
Robert Pattinson learned 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 (in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles).
“It was pretty gross. I thought I was going to look a lot trendier than I did,” Pattinson laments. After months alternating between a dyed black perm and hydrogen peroxide-lightened ’do, “your hair is no longer hair. It’s just strands of chemicals.”
Temporary hair loss behind him, 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, he’s soft-spoken yet waggish when talking Good Time, which earned him career-best reviews when the pulpy crime thriller premiered at Cannes Film Festival earlier this summer.
Pattinson, 31, who became an international heartthrob playing vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight franchise, 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). He emailed sibling filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie after seeing an image of 2014 drama Heaven Knows What, and met with them before Good Time’s script was even written.
“You could just tell that when he said he wanted to be involved and go deep, he wasn’t messing around,” says Benny, who co-stars as Connie’s intellectually challenged brother, Nick.
Pattinson was drawn to Connie’s brashness, but never overanalyzed his motivations. He considers the character an “innately narcissistic” and “fundamentally deluded” criminal, who wrings money and resources from his girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and a smitten teen (Taliah Webster), and doesn’t blink at throwing them under the bus.
Pattinson came to Queens, N.Y., two months before shooting started to get a feel for Connie’s world. He befriended ex-convicts and spoke to corrections officers in Manhattan prisons, where he would arrive in character and try to blend in. The actor also went Method with Benny, exchanging fake prison correspondence and improvising scuffles at a local car wash and Dunkin’ Donuts. To his relief, no one recognized him.
“If someone sees two grown adults having a strange interaction with each other, people avoid it,” Pattinson says. The paparazzi and his rabid fans (known as “Twihards”) also were MIA: “There wasn’t a single cellphone picture of me the whole time. I was so concerned about that happening, because I loved (the idea) of the film world being blurred with reality and having people on the street react to you.”
Pattinson splits his time between London and L.A. with partner FKA Twigs, a musician, and says much of the attention from Twilight has subsided, thanks in part to his own crafty methods of flying under the radar.
“If you’re in London in the middle of winter, just wear shorts, Oakley sunglasses and a backwards baseball cap, and then everyone’s like, ‘Oh, it’s just some Australian guy,’ ” Pattinson says. “I’ve learned different things in different cities.
“But maybe I’m just completely doing it for no reason and I’d be completely fine. The paranoia within myself has definitely died down a bit.”