Since breaking free of the “that guy from Twilight” label, Robert Pattinson has played a lighthouse keeper, an explorer looking for a lost city in the Amazon, a bank robber on the run, and a… scarf tycoon in Tenet? (I have not seen Tenet.) In The Devil All the Time, his new Netflix movie co-starring Tom Holland as a good ol’ boy turned sinner, he was cast as a reverend. That sounds normal compared to a space criminal, but because this is Robert Pattinson we’re talking about, there’s nothing normal about his performance.
When asked by Esquire UK where Pattinson looked for inspiration to play Reverend Preston Teagardin (fantastic name), director Antonio Campos replied, “We looked at a lot of different YouTube videos of evangelical preachers and also the pop-stars of the time, like listening to interviews with Elvis and hearing the way he would talk. Then Rob’s own madness; he had his own process and was on his own consuming a lot of different references. I didn’t really hear the accent until we started to shoot, he showed up in character and showed me Teagardin for the first time.” Pattinson didn’t stay in character throughout the entire shoot, but “it was like he would kind of zero in and be in it. The performance is almost closer to a possession than it is a performance,” Campos said.
Boyd Crowder would be proud.
The Devil All the Time, which also stars Bill Skarsgård, Riley Keough, Jason Clarke, Sebastian Stan, Haley Bennett, Eliza Scanlen, and Mia Wasikowska, premieres on Netflix on September 16.
(Via Esquire)
