Robert Pattinson had teenage girls screaming in the background as he promoted Twilight mid-franchise in Cannes in 2009. It was a sight to behold.

The British actor may have announced himself as a major Hollywood star but, not wanting to remain a sensation just for teens, he made some eclectic choices in the films he would pursue.

These include David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert (starring Nicole Kidman), Claire Denis’s High Life, the Safdie brothers’ Good Time, Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, Australian director David Michôd’s The Rover and The King and Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17.

When it comes to Hollywood, this year has been the biggest achievement for the 40-year-old, who started as a child actor playing Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

For The Odyssey (he played Antinous), Pattinson re-teamed with Christopher Nolan, who first directed him in Tenet. He played opposite Zendaya in The Drama, will soon be seen as main villain Scytale in Dune: Part Three (again with Zendaya) and he is reprising his titular role in The Batman sequel, set to release in 2028.

But first comes Primetime, which perhaps represents Pattinson’s most adventurous film to date. Initially he wanted to produce the film but ended up as the star, playing real-life journalist and presenter Chris Hansen, who pioneered reality television with To Catch a Predator, a segment of the current affairs show Dateline NBC, which aired in the US between 2004 and 2007.

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Hansen would trap a paedophile on camera with the help of a supposed teen volunteer from the Perverted-Justice website and would present himself, famously telling the paedophile to “have a seat” and read excerpts from the incriminating online chat. Audiences loved watching the predators as they squirmed and panicked.

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When Pattinson was sent the script by a friend, he thought it read “kind of weirdly” and older. “But now I feel older anyway,” he told media in Venice. Following a recommendation, he hired US documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim to direct the film, Oppenheim’s first narrative feature. Pattinson was attracted to the 30-year-old’s “docu-fantasia” approach.

“I was always looking for directors who have a very distinct sense of style and kind of aesthetics, and I thought he would really, really suit and elevate this movie,” Pattinson notes.

The pair developed the script over a lengthy period without the idea of Pattinson taking the Hansen role.

“I was trying to mould the part to be the best for somebody else to play, and then I got more and more attached to it,” Pattinson recalls. “I didn’t really realise that I was kind of researching the part for myself. And then there’s something about Chris Hansen himself, a character you can’t help but imitate.”

‘There’s an energy that comes up, which is what every actor wants to play, a kind of vibrant energy, a magnetism’

Pattinson was fascinated by Hansen’s presence.

“I’d watched the show when I was younger, and I didn’t even think about it,” he says. “When you obsessively watch it, you realise there’s a strange alchemy with what’s going on with the aesthetics of the show, how it’s directed, how the things are put together and the time period.

“But something he’s doing is the reason why people are still talking about that show 20 years later, and it’s not to do solely with the subject matter. I think there was something about the show that was very ground-breaking, kind of breaking the rules of television and also in some ways, bureaucracy.

“Even after watching literally thousands of hours of everything to do with the show, you still can’t really put your finger on it … There’s an energy that comes up, which is what every actor wants to play, a kind of vibrant energy, a magnetism.”

Oppenheim creates a stylised version of the Hansen story, which he discovered through parodies, including on TV’s South Park.

“Chris Hansen was like this mythological being who had these one-liners that reminded me of Tony Montana. I was always fascinated as a young child about the theatricality of the show. I was so confused by it. Was it a prank show? Was it a news show? Was it a circus with Chris Hansen as a ringmaster? I thought that would make for such an interesting film.”

Oppenheim says Hansen’s show was an amazing mixture of truth and fiction.

“Chris Hansen came up with this unbelievable apparatus where he mixed artifice, actors pretending to be children, houses that would be converted, props like cookies, sweet tea, pepperoni and pizzas – these mundane things that became almost mythological in the show and the culture – and they collided with an extremely real, extremely dangerous situation,” Oppenheim says.

For Pattinson, playing the lead role as well as producing proved quite a feat, during his busiest period ever.

“I’d just had a baby as well (a daughter with fiancé actress and singer Suki Waterhouse), so I kind of had no desire to go out at night. So suddenly I had twice as much time to do anything, which was very very helpful.”

He explains how he was “extremely attached” to the Primetime project from the beginning, and to everybody involved in it.

The talented English actor and producer is certainly on a roll. While Pattinson looks likely to receive an Oscar nomination for best actor for Primetime, Oppenheim’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything (which he co-directed with Nathan Fielder), has been a US box-office sensation and looks set to become the first documentary nominated for a best picture Oscar. It’s released in Australia in November.

Primetime opens in cinemas on October 29. 

Helen Barlow is a Paris-based Australian freelance journalist and critic. In 2019 she received the La Plume d’Or for her services to French cinema. She is a voting member of the Lumiere Awards and a member of The International Federation of Film Critics.