IT WAS ROBERT Pattinson’s idea to take a pottery class. Since becoming a father this past March, the 38-year-old English actor has been searching for what he calls “healthy” hobbies. He’s considered bonsai (“they just start rotting”), trapeze (“can’t do that in public”), tennis (“not enough spatial awareness”) and dance (“my spinal cord freezes”). Two decades into his film career, he seems restless for new ways to express himself that don’t require a crew of hundreds or any of the baggage that comes with being one of the world’s most famous men. In recent years, he invented the recipe for a bastardized arancini-like dish called piccolini cuscino, or “little pillow” (“I got quite deep into it with a frozen-food manufacturer”); a nine-foot-long sofa with armrests as wide as the seat (“It weighs a ton — that’s probably one of the reasons it’s difficult to sell”); and pants with vertical pockets (“Why do they always have to be sticking out like weird little ears?”). He’s also been designing a straight-back chair with a slit running down the center of the cushion that “opens up for you like you’re in a kind of cocoon,” he says. To illustrate the idea, he built a maquette with a Fleshlight sex toy and an empty toilet paper roll.
On a gray August afternoon, I meet the actor at his friend’s house in De Beauvoir Town, a leafy neighborhood in northeast London where he and his fiancée, the English actress and musician Suki Waterhouse, have been staying with their baby girl while visiting from Los Angeles, and walk to a ceramics studio about a mile down the road. In a week, Waterhouse, 32, will open for Taylor Swift at Wembley Stadium, playing songs from her newly released second album, “Memoir of a Sparklemuffin.” By then, Pattinson will be in Canada shooting a movie with Jennifer Lawrence, but first he wanted to rerecord a voice-over for his next feature, “Mickey 17,” a dystopian satire by Bong Joon Ho, the Oscar-winning South Korean director of “Parasite” (2019). For now, though, Pattinson is hunched over a worktable, hand-sculpting a mug with a distinctly phallic handle. “It’s a giant carrot,” he clarifies — a gift for his hosts. They must really like carrots, I offer, but the joke doesn’t land. “I just think it’d be quite satisfying to have a cup this large,” he says. As I begin to wonder if I’ve offended him, he leans back to appraise his work. “It’s got a bit of a curve in it,” he says with a smirk. Intentionally making a clay penis in front of a journalist isn’t just a choice; it’s a challenge. “I’d love to see how you’re going to use this,” he tells me.
Despite appearing at age 17 in “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” (2005) and becoming a media fixation a few years later for playing a besotted vampire in all five “Twilight” films — at the height of the franchise’s success, he’d hire decoy cars and hide in trunks to avoid being swarmed by fans and paparazzi — Pattinson is surprisingly unguarded. He doesn’t take his craft or himself too seriously: In a span of less than 30 minutes, he tells me that he’s ignorant, frail, terrified, egomaniacal, terrible, rage-filled and vain. The lone press clipping in his London childhood bedroom is a framed copy of People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive issue from a year he wasn’t even included. (George Clooney gave it to him as a gag.) Recently, he dug out his acting awards and put them on a shelf; within days, he’d returned them to his storage unit.
ImageDior Men jacket, $4,200, and pants, $5,300, dior.com; and Zegna sweater, $1,390, zegna.com.Credit...Photograph by Collier Schorr. Styled by Jay MassacretIt’s a strange era to be a Hollywood actor. Early in Pattinson’s career, the rise of social media destroyed the tabloid economy — which, even though it was invasive, did keep people talking about him. (“It was an insane time,” says his friend Zac Efron, 37, who in 2006 starred in “High School Musical.” “I was invested in making sure he was all right because I knew what it was doing to me.”) In 2020, Pattinson’s time-travel movie, “Tenet,” directed by Christopher Nolan, was used as a test balloon to determine whether audiences would return to theaters after pandemic restrictions began to ease. (They didn’t.) And although his superhero film “The Batman” came out in 2022, the second installment in Matt Reeves’s trilogy probably won’t be released until fall 2026, partly because of last year’s labor strikes. “I could genuinely be retiring by the end of them,” Pattinson says.
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