On Thursday morning, the following headline led me down a Robert Pattinson rabbit hole in search of the truth: “Robert Pattison Rewatched ‘The Twilight Saga: New Moon’ and Has Fresh Thoughts: ‘It’s Just Very Warm Memories.’ Was this true? Had Pattinson, former Twilight heartthrob and, consequently, the world’s foremost Twilight hater, warmed up to the series that nearly pigeonholed his acting career?
Confused, I continued to search:
Wow, I thought, for one minute. Maybe he has changed.
Err—WRONG! These headlines appear to be wishful thinking, if not written to outright deceive people like me. A closer look at the interview referenced in these headlines reveals that Pattinson didn’t quite specify his feelings towards Twilight. To me, it seems he was referring to the audience at large:
“It seems like with younger people in their late teens, early 20s, it’s sort of become quite a hip thing to like,” Pattinson says. “It’s a fascinating second wave of people appreciating it, which is kind of cool. I think when anything becomes a massive phenomenon, there’s always people who get annoyed because it’s just everywhere. But now it seems like a retro thing: the soundtrack, the fashion. It’s like, ‘Oh, that’s so late 2000s.’ “
And here he says some nice stuff about the Twilight soundtrack—which is not the same as saying he loves the movies, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves:
Pattinson says he watched part of the second movie, 2009’s “New Moon,” on TV “just the other day, and it genuinely does have an incredibly good soundtrack. I completely forgot, but the soundtracks were quite ahead of their time.”
He then says that other people have fond memories of the series (emphasis mine):
“It’s lovely now that the mania is not so intense,” Pattinson says. “People come up (to me) and just have very fond memories of it. It’s a really sweet thing. I think the only scary part was right in the thick of it all, when it was very, very intense. Now the intensity has died down and it’s just very warm memories.”
Who do those very warm memories belong to? It’s ambiguous, but given Pattinson’s history of gleefully bashing Twilight, we have no clear confirmation. Making snide comments about the franchise seems to bring him (and me) real joy—why take that away from us?