Robert Pattinson Almost Got Fired From Twilight For Acting “Too Emo”

If you’ve been paying any attention to the hype surrounding DC’s upcoming The Batman, you may have heard that Robert Pattinson’s take on the titular character is very, very emo. And the 35-year-old actor has made it clear he wouldn’t have it any other way—even if he looked “really, really, really dead” after all those solitary hours in the dark by the time they wrapped. “DC is the kind of emo comic,” he recently told GQ. “There’s a nihilistic side to it. Even the artwork is really, really different. So, hopefully, there are a lot of sad people in the world.”

It’s not the first time Pattinson preferred his characters a little more brooding. The difference is that now he has a little more pull in the industry than before his breakthrough as Edward Cullen in the Twilight series. “I do think there’s something in that first movie,” Pattinson reflected in an additional video interview with GQ. “You could see that people were taking it seriously and it has a passion to it. I was 21, and kind of wanted to make it as arty as possible. And so we had this strange tension where the studio was kind of a little bit scared to make things a little too emo and stuff and I thought that was the only way to play it.” And by “a little bit scared,” Pattinson means they almost had him fired.

“It just seems so ridiculous talking about it now because I was literally—I spent so much time infuriated,” the actor continued. “That’s definitely something about being 21 as well because I can’t believe how I was acting half the time. Like when I think back on it, the scene where Edward introduces Bella to his family for the first time, I remember that being the day because my agent and my manager came up for a surprise visit, and I was like, ‘oh hey,’ and just thought everything was fine and then at lunch, they were like, ‘okay, so whatever you’re doing right now, after lunch, just do the opposite or you’ll be fired by the end of the day.’” Little did he know that 14 years later, he’d get to play the ultimate version of the role he envisioned: Pattinson’s Batman even wears heavy black eyeliner.