Over the past 15 years, the Twilight star has been telling stories about befriending elephants, selling pornography, and watching clowns die. None of them are true.
Outside the TODAY Show studio, young women threw themselves against barricades, clawing and craning to catch a glimpse of 25-year-old Robert Pattinson as he was welcomed onto set by television host Matt Lauer. It was 2011 and Pattinson was invited onto the TODAY Show to promote the motion-picture Water for Elephants, a romantic adaptation of author Sara Gruen's critically acclaimed novel. Pattinson fidgeted on the edge of his seat, hands clasped between his knees, his responses punctuated by sudden, breathy bursts of awkward laughter. Pattinson, no doubt feeling intimidated and probably a bit nervous, is, at the time, still a baby in the eyes of the film industry. Lauer begins the interview, asking Pattinson if he had ever considered running away to the circus in his youth. Raking a shaky hand through his hair and flashing a toothy smile, Pattinson responds with an outrageous story of witnessing a fatal clown car explosion on his first trip to the circus, shocking Lauer into stunned silence. Later, at the film’s premier in Berlin, Pattinson admitted on stage that he actually made the whole thing up. “Someone asked me about my experiences with circuses,” he said, “and I thought, oh god, I have nothing interesting to say... so I made it all up.”
Making appearances on talk-shows as early as 2011, Pattinson seems to have developed a comfortable routine. He arrives on set with swagger and a smile on his face, waves to his adoring fans, cracks jokes and emits an awkward yet endearing energy. While the audience may be blinded by the combination of his good looks and nervousness, the tall tales seem to flood out at unexpected times. In a 2014 interview with Jimmy Kimmel, shares a story about the time he made a substitute teacher cry. Staring off into space, brow furrowed in concentration and mouth contorted into a tight-lipped smirk, Pattinson paints the scene with impeccable detail, telling the story as if it happened just the other day. “I actually bullied one into leaving by locking her in a cupboard until she cried,” he says. What’s strange is that the lies only make his fans seem to like him more. ROBsessed, a fan page dedicated to all things Robert Pattinson, has dubbed these moments of deception as adorable Pattinsonisms. “He's just so witty and charming, I love it when he pulls out his Pattinsonsims!”
Why does Pattinson lie so much? There are a few possible explanations. Maybe Pattinson is just joking around? He’s an actor, after all, and the publicity part of the gig might not be his cup of tea. Maybe he’s just having some fun with the aspect of his job that he hates? Perhaps the fact that he exaggerates so completely is a sign that, just like in his roles on film, he’s embodying an entirely different persona in an interview setting? Or maybe the answer is simpler than that… We all want to give Pattinson the benefit of the doubt. He’s an attractive, charismatic guy and was the teen heartthrob we grew up with. What if he’s just a liar?
There are the stories he tells publicly. Then there are the stories about himself that he allows to circulate without correction. At the beginning of his career, the “Twilight era,” a rumor circulated as a result of a comment Pattinson made in a 2009 interview with Extra. When asked to confirm if he hadn't washed his hair in six weeks, Pattinson responded, “Probably. I don't know. I don't really see the point in washing your hair.” Following the spread of the interview, anonymous crew on the Twilight set fueled the fire, confirming his bad hygiene and body odor. “He stinks. I mean, it’s awful,” one staff member told E! News. “He never showers, and it drives people on the set crazy.” Not even four days following these allegations, Seventeen Magazine published a blog post titled “Robert Pattinson Stinks?” which received a large number of interactions from readers.
It was not until 2014, in an article published by The Wall Street Journal promoting his partnership with Dior, that Pattinson refutes these claims. “I was a brush-your-teeth-and-have-a-shower kind of guy,” he said. Pattinson seems in no rush to correct any widespread misconceptions about himself, letting rumors circulate until his publicist forces him to address them or they are brought up in interviews. He’s not on social media. He doesn’t put out voluntary press releases. Pattinson has to be cornered by an interviewer if anything about him is ever to be checked or corrected.
Telling falsehoods about himself is something Pattinson has been doing pretty much his entire life. In a 2022 interview with GQ Magazine, Pattinson recounted a drawn-out fabrication he maintained throughout middle and high school. To impress his girlfriend and her “cool” older friends, he claimed that he dealt drugs, transporting them via floppy disks. “I had this idea I'd get floppy disks, open up the floppy disk, pour this kind of powder stuff inside, and then spray it with, like, some kind of cleaning product so that it'd smell chemical-y, and seal all of it in,” he said. “Then I'd show it to kids who were probably 15 or 16, and everybody believed me. And I kind of got this reputation: This kid is crazy. He's a drug dealer!”
The story suggests that he’s not just purposefully messing with us in interviews. He’s been telling false stories about himself for a long time, for various purposes. In a 2011 interview with Ellen, Pattinson won over the audience with a story about saving snails. “Everybody used to chuck snails at each other in school, and I used to try and save them,” he said. “And not only did I get in trouble for it, I got suspended for doing it. For saving the snails.” The audience ooh-ed and aww-ed at his heroic attempts to save the poor slimy creatures. It later became obvious, however, that this childhood-tale was fictional as Pattinson embellished and left-out quite a few details in his 2022 retelling of the “snail story.” In the Ellen telling, he talked about how he had built a little home for the snails in his classroom that his teacher eventually told him he had to dispose of. In the latter telling, he said his teacher approved of it and that he beat up kids who hurt the snails.
"I think, like, a lot of my dreams have intermingled with reality now."
Memory is fallible. Different details stand out to us at different times. It’s possible that the Ellen experience made him rethink that experience and then retell it differently. But a niggling part of me also suspects that none of it is true, that this isn’t just a few details that have been rearranged. Rather it’s all fiction. It’s not clear that Pattinson knows the difference between reality and his rewriting at this point anyway. And it’s a consistent theme. In a 2011 interview with Jimmy Kimmel, Pattinson denies his previous claims of working in the hand modeling industry. "I think, like, a lot of my dreams have intermingled with reality now."
Fans defend him left and right. But I wonder whether their insistence that he’s always just joking is really about them wanting to turn a blind eye. Maybe his lovestruck followers refuse to believe that this incredibly hot celebrity is straight up not a good person. Stretching the truth to make oneself look better is understandable, human nature even. But to go out of one’s way to produce lie after lie hints at a deeper problem. In an even more extreme example, Pattinson, in a 2017 interview with Jimmy Kimmel, claimed he was asked to pleasure a dog for his recent movie Good Time. “There's this one scene we shot where basically a drug dealer bursts into the room and I was sleeping with the dog and basically giving the dog a hand job," he told Kimmel. “The director was like 'just do it for real man, don't be a p*ssy.’” Pattinson goes on to share that he refused to perform bestiality and thus a prosthetic was made for the dog.
Immediately following the airing of the episode, PETA released a statement applauding Pattinson and insinuating an investigation of the directorial staff would be carried out. Chaos ensued, Pattinson’s publicist working overtime to undo the damage to the reputations of both the director and the film. One of the directors, Josh Safdie, posted a tweet claiming that the actor's story was false. Pattinson eventually released a statement to E! explaining that the anecdote “got out of hand.” Lying is not a victimless act. There were professional consequences for many people because of this lie. And the incident belies a carelessness in Pattinson when it comes to his professional contacts.
In 2007 he arrived at the Los Angeles premiere of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” intoxicated. “I got to the crowd, and there’s thousands and thousands of Harry Potter fans,” said Pattinson, “I don’t even know why I didn’t think about it, I just thought it’s cool I’ll just walk there.” Later he shared the harsh reprimand he received from his agent following his less-than professional appearance and release of photos from the event. “They were like, ‘Why are you being photographed like this? You look like you’re out of your mind!’” said Pattinson. Erratic behavior demonstrated by celebrities can often indicate that they might be cracking under the immense pressure of stardom.
But Pattinson shows no signs of fragility, “I definitely do get a certain high from it,’” Pattinson admitted to Willem Dafoe in 2018. “There’s a little gremlin inside of me 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… I’ve given my publicist a number of heart attacks.” Pattinson’s behavior shows, in addition to the lack of conscientiousness for the professionals around him, that he must honestly believe he can get away with anything. Pattinson does not simply have a warped view of the consequences of his actions, it seems he genuinely does not care whether there are any negative consequences following a lie.
“There’s a little gremlin inside of me that thinks, ‘Just say something shocking. You’re only here for a few minutes, say something terrible.’”
His responses to commonplace interview questions reveal he really is a man with nothing to lose, making offhand comments like “I don’t smoke crack in public anymore.” And yet, Pattinson could never fall from his status as an object of obsessive adoration. The weirder and darker his stories become, the more people love him for being “real” and successfully pulling the wool over the eyes of entertainment news figureheads.
I’ll give him credit. Over the years, Pattinson has flourished in the film industry, defying conventional stardom by working on largely independent films. Since he stepped into the limelight in 2005, Pattinson’s chiseled jaw, baby blue eyes, and oh-so-pouty expression has set hearts aflutter. But look beyond the pretty face… he has a serious character flaw. He lies casually and constantly, doubling down without hesitation in the face of questioning. The red flag it seems everyone is missing or, rather, choosing to ignore, is Pattinson’s admission that he’s done this his whole life, not just when he’s had to come up with interesting shit to say in back-to-back interviews, and it doesn’t look like he’ll stop any time soon.
While lying itself is not a formal diagnosis, according to Bayside Psychotherapy, this behavior can be a sign of another underlying condition, such as a personality disorder or factitious disorder. These disorders include overlapping symptoms, including compulsive lying. “Compulsive lying” describes a condition in which a person tells falsehoods out of habit, sometimes for no reason at all. Interestingly, Pattinson’s routine aligns strangely well with this framework: Many of his lies are believable and may have truthful elements, the lies continue for a long period of time, and there appears to be no ulterior motive even when some lies may damage his reputation or others.
I’ve been waiting for everyone to figure it out, but it has become increasingly clear that I am alone in my knowledge. I took the red pill and was condemned to sit with this unsettling truth, screaming into the ears of contented ignorance. Can’t you see? It's past time to consider that Robert Pattinson isn’t just a “funny guy” and needs some serious evaluation. And yet, when I point out his issues to other people I know, the tendency is to turn on me, never to look more closely at him. And that’s the crux of it. Pattinson’s fans have such an attachment to him, which he’s probably aware of, that they refuse to see it.
As my Pattinson-loving roommate said when I confronted her about my observations: “Don’t you think you are being too harsh on him? I mean, why did you have to target him of all people?”