Robert Pattinson Is a New Kind of Movie Star: The Anti-Tom Cruise

In the last few years (ever since “Top Gun: Maverick”), Tom Cruise has often been hailed as The Last Movie Star. He’s certainly the gold standard, though it might be appropriate to add Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts to that category too. All three feel like The Last Movie Stars — though what I’m really saying, of course, is that they’re the last movie stars to come out of the monoculture. That’s why all three are monostars. You still feel that any of them, in the right light, can own the screen and own the world. That’s baked into the karma of their presence. It’s what drives their larger-than-life quality.

At the same time, it would be silly and backward to look at Tom and Brad and Julia and declare that the movie-star thing ends with them. Something ends with them. A certain kind of stardom. But that doesn’t mean that the movie star has gone away. They’re still being minted as we speak. Movie stars will probably never be as big as they used to be, but a new kind of star is rising from the ashes of our fragmented, niche-driven, post-romantic, postmodern world. And there is no more perfect an incarnation of the new stardom than Robert Pattinson.

Just watch him in “Primetime,” where he plays Chris Hansen, the host of “To Catch a Predator,” as a scoundrel and a sleaze, a man obsessed with ratings but also obsessed with seeing — and selling — himself as an arbiter of “virtue.” The way Pattinson plays him, the Hansen of “Primetime” is like a come-hither fusion of Geraldo Rivera and Dracula; bathed in garish neon color, he looks even more like a vampire than Pattinson’s Edward Cullen did; he practically has fangs. You might say, “Chris Hansen doesn’t look like that,” but what’s uncanny about “Primetime” is that Pattinson seems to be playing the inner Hansen, the anxious opportunistic reptile who turned “To Catch a Predator” into a depraved form of squirm theater. The show pretended to be “capturing” men who solicited sex with children, but its true agenda was to humiliate them in public. It was really a voyeuristic revenge fantasy. You don’t have to put yourself in the position of “defending pedophiles” to say that there’s something seriously wrong with that.

Pattinson gives a mesmerizing performance, and the most fascinating thing about it is that it’s a star performance. The movie portrays Chris Hansen as a petty showboating hypocrite, yet the way it works is that we’re keyed into him. He’s the film’s oily center of gravity. And maybe the only way that could succeed is with a movie star. But could you imagine Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt in a role like this one? In his long and varied career, Cruise has gone “dark” — never more brilliantly than in “Magnolia” (his greatest performance; he was robbed of the Oscar when Harvey Weinstein used his tricks to win it for Michael Caine for the godawful “Cider House Rules”). Cruise, in a cartoon way, also goes dark in “Digger,” a film that’s about to enter the marketplace with a splat. But in “Primetime,” Pattison goes pitch-black. That’s his nervy dyspeptic magnetism. He’s a star for the age of entropy — for an era when everything is falling apart.

Pattinson, of course, was launched by what felt like a tail-end monoculture franchise: the “Twilight” films. He played Edward, the 108-year-old teenage vampire, with a scowling leer that let you know this bloodsucker was no lost boy. But having established himself as a new-style neurasthenic matinee idol, Pattinson made a career decision that was driven and daring and eccentric, and he stuck to it. In 2012, the year of the concluding “Twilight” film, “Breaking Dawn — Part 2,” he also starred in David Cronenberg’s “Cosmopolis,” playing a billionaire rotter who spends the entire movie riding around in a stretch limo, doing decadent things, and from that moment Pattinson never went back to “normal” roles.

He sought out the edgiest indies he could find, playing a neurotic T.E. Lawrence in Werner Herzog’s “Queen of the Desert,” a scuzzy Queens bank robber in the Safdie brothers’ “Good Time,” an explorer’s recessive aide-de-camp in James Gray’s “The Lost City of Z,” and a surly drifter in Robert Eggers’ “The Lighthouse,” disappearing into every role with wormy devotion. During this period, which lasted close to 10 years, you practically expected to see Pattinson with a goth tattoo on his chest that read “Character Actor in Leading Man’s Body.”

He wasn’t playing; he meant it. Even when his scuzz-indie streak finally ended, it wasn’t in the usual way, with some big slick sellout. He did “Tenet” for Christopher Nolan, and then he finally took a leap into the franchise arena with “The Batman,” which might be the most soul-jangling superhero movie ever made (its only competition would be “The Dark Knight,” and in certain ways “The Batman” had it beat). His Bruce Wayne was brooding enough to make Christian Bale’s look breezy. But the performance was moody and brilliant, and it crystalized Pattinson’s cred. He was a character actor in a leading man’s body. But he was something else too: a new kind of movie star. And in 2026, a year that Pattison owns, he drew on that anti-wholesome charisma in three performances, each one darker than the last: his nervous wreck of an impending groom in “The Drama”; his evil suitor in “The Odyssey” (a performance that could get him an Oscar); and his debauched carny-barker-of-pervs “newsman” in “Primetime.”

It’s not just that he’s terrific in each of those films. In “The Drama” and “Primetime,” he did that singular and defining movie-star thing: He put butts in seats. (He probably didn’t hurt in that department in “The Odyssey” either.) It helped that he had A24 — the new Miramax — to help shepherd his popularity. But you can’t shepherd what doesn’t already exist. An entire generation has followed Pattinson from the “Twilight” movies to the moment he’s in now.

To return, for a moment, to the old kind of star: Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Julia Roberts are great actors, but in each case they won our hearts by playing idealized versions of who we are. Cruise the cocky clean maverick, Pitt the glam bad boy, Roberts the incandescent pretty woman: Their stardom is built on their being old-school movie gods. We already know how Cruise, after the flameout of “Digger,” will pick himself up and dust himself off: He’ll go back to playing the eternal star of our Tom Cruise dreams. But Robert Pattinson is the anti-Cruise, because his stardom is based on how far he’s willing to stray from the ideal. That’s his upside-down glamour — that we’ll follow him anywhere.