Credit: Dangerous Minds / Maximilian Bühn

The career arc of Robert Pattinson is genuinely baffling.

Stepping into the public spotlight in 2005 as Cedric Diggory in the Harry Potter franchise at the age of 19, Pattinson was catapulted into megastardom three years later when he was cast as Edward Cullen in The Twilight Saga. Not only did he become one of the biggest celebrities of the era, with hordes of screaming tweens hanging on his every word, but he also became one of the most hated in certain circles of the internet, with scores of people painting him as a talentless, witless pretty boy dumbing down culture in his godawful vampire flicks.

Now, a lot of this was your common or garden misogyny, telling people to hate things that girls and young women were into. However, don’t let the nostalgia goggles fool you, Twilight really is so bad that not even the combined talents of Pattinson and co-star Kristen Stewart can make it worth watching today. As time would go on to prove, those are two of the biggest talents of their generation, so that’s saying a hell of a lot. I remember at the time that the idea of Robert Pattinson playing a role like Batman would be a joke made to illustrate the death of Hollywood.

Yet, when Pattinson was announced as taking on the iconic cowl, people were ecstatic. This is because in the decade and a half that separated Twilight and The Batman, the man once dismissed as R-Patz revealed himself not only to be an immensely talented actor but a total freak. Happy to take on roles in pictures like The Lighthouse and Good Time that completely upended his serious, brooding image and saw him take genuine risks on screen.

However, if you knew where to look, you would have seen this all coming, because Pattinson was being a freak off-screen for a lot longer than that.

What showed the strange side of Robert Pattinson?

Honestly, if you paid attention to the way he talked about playing Edward Cullen, you could see that Robert Pattinson was different from the standard British actor of his age. He took the role because he was fascinated by playing a sociopathic, century-old serial killer and talked about this openly while promoting the movie. This is clearly a guy who goes his own way and won’t hesitate to speak his mind, and the contrast between that and the matinée idol Hollywood tried to make him into at first was fascinating.

Then a story broke that showed the true depths of Pattinson’s loveably bizarre behaviour. Shortly after the success of Twilight, Pattinson got himself a stalker. She was probably not alone in stalking literal Edward Cullen, but this one managed to get a lot closer to him than most. So close in fact that Pattinson himself began to notice her. Perhaps knowing that the best thing to do is destroy the image that this woman had in her head of him, Pattinson did something that under no circumstances anyone should do with a stalker, and invited her to dinner.

When the two sat down to eat, the actor spent the entire time unloading about the newfound stresses of his life, whining and moaning about his situation until she could take it no longer. She got up, left and never bothered him again.

In 2009, he explained, “I had a stalker while filming a movie in Spain last year. She stood outside of my apartment every day for weeks — all day, every day. I was so bored and lonely that I went out and had dinner with her.”

…or so we fucking thought.

It turned out that the entire story was cobblers. One of the many stories that Pattinson made up to amuse himself while on the press circuit for Twilight, like the time he claimed to see a clown die in a miniature car explosion as a kid.

Clearly, fiction’s loss is acting’s gain. Yet, even if it isn’t true, a few other things prove Pattinson’s eccentricities, like how he was happy to lie through his teeth to the entire world for years!