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The career of Robert Pattinson has had an unusual trajectory. He became an international star thanks to the Twilight films before transitioning into arthouse and indie films. Now he seems to be embracing his action phase with movies like The Batman and Mickey 17 putting him firmly in the spotlight once again. However, this isn’t the Robert Pattinson I love the most. No, my favorite thing about Robert Pattinson isn’t his transition from teen heartthrob to action star; it is the chaotic gremlin he is when he’s promoting his movies.

Even Pattinson has acknowledged that he is in new territory (and poked fun at himself in the process) while promoting Mickey 17. “It’s quite strange,” he told a reporter on the red carpet. “There’s a bunch of guys, which is a new one for me!” Compared to the screaming tweens that swarmed his movies during the Twilight era, this has been a big change for him. His reaction might be surprisingly candid for a major Hollywood star, but this was quite tame for Pattinson.

See, Robert Pattinson likes to lie. And I don’t mean in a “he won’t break an NDA” way. No, he will say anything in an interview just because he can. He admitted it when he was promoting The Lighthouse, telling his co-star Willem Dafoe, “I definitely do get a certain high from it. There’s a little gremlin that thinks, ‘Just say something shocking. You’re only here for a few minutes. Say something terrible.’ There’s a kind of perverse glee I get from that, but I’ve given my publicist a number of heart attacks.”

What kind of chaos does Robert Pattinson give in interviews? Sometimes they are weirdly horrifying, like telling people that he watched a clown die the first time he went to the circus (which never happened). Sometimes he tries to convince Jimmy Kimmel that he enjoys being spit on “in an erotic way.” Or when he said he’d have added a walrus to the sex scene in Twilight: Breaking Dawn just because he could. The man will say anything to fill empty space in an interview and I love it.

Personally, my favorite was when he nearly burned down his kitchen making what he called piccolini cusscino (little pillow) pasta. During an interview to promote Tenet, Robert Pattinson explained that he had spent the COVID-19 quarantine experimenting with new recipes and insisted on demonstrating how he made pasta in a microwave. The ingredients were:

• Corn Flakes
• One large lighter
• Nine packs of pre-sliced cheese
• Sauce (literally “just any sauce”)
• Lots of sugar

Unsurprisingly, Pattinson’s microwave exploded during the demonstration, probably because of the large lighter you'll note in the list of said ingredients. To satisfy the chaotic gremlin inside him, Robert Pattinson nearly burned down his kitchen. That is commitment to the bit that you just don’t see enough of.

And that’s what I love about the man. Sure, he’s proven to be a wonderful capable actor with a string of hits that should dismiss any idea that he is merely that sparkly guy from Twilight, but the real magic comes when he talks to reporters. Here is a man, much like myself, who simply cannot help but bring a tiny amount of chaos into the world. In an industry that tries to polish every star so that they all respond to every question the exact same way, it is wonderful to watch Robert Pattinson indulge the little voice in his head that says “Go on. See what happens.”

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