Robert Pattinson Reveals He Went to Therapy, Talks Extreme Efforts to 'Disappear' After 'Twilight'

By
GQ

Robert Pattinson is not a fan of being interviewed -- or being famous.

The 31-year-old actor covers the September issue of GQ, in which he talks about his unconventional career path after Twilight made him a household name. Clearly, Pattinson was affected by his extreme lack of privacy after the stunning success of the films, and describes the measures he took to evade paparazzi.

Pattinson says that during the height of the Twilight phenomenon, he would ride in trunks of cars frequently to avoid being seen, or trade outfits with his friends in restaurant bathrooms and have them each call Ubers in different directions so that photographers wouldn't know which car he got into. He recalls once driving around for hours until the sun came up after realizing he was being tailed by photographers, so that they wouldn't know where his new house was.

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"People were like, 'It's fine, who cares? They're just photos or whatever,'" he now says. "They'll say, 'Just live your life.' But that's not life for me, if someone's observing it."

Eventually, Pattinson says his tactics worked because it was too much of a "hassle" for paparazzi to keep following him.

"There are ways to disappear, like, fairly easily," Pattinson explains. "But you have to be living a quite strange life. It just involves effort, and most people can't really be bothered to put the effort in."

"They're just losers trying to do their jobs," he adds about paparazzi.

GQ

It is this extreme need for privacy that Pattinson continuously comes back to in the interview. He doesn't talk about girlfriend FKA Twigs, though it is revealed that he calls her "Twigs." The British star says he went to therapy a few years ago during a low time, and the therapist observed how good he was at talking without saying anything.

"If I could stay silent, I would," he says bluntly.

These days, Pattinson chooses roles that he can "disappear" into. After Twilight, he's chosen to star in smaller indie films like Cosmopolis, The Rover and Queen of the Desert, and says he doesn't have the confidence to star in superhero movies.

"I've never been that concerned if someone sees the movie," he also comments.

Although, Pattinson is getting rave reviews for his new role in Good Time, in which he plays a petty criminal from Queens, New York, desperate to help his intellectually disabled brother after a bank robbery gone wrong. He painstakingly practiced to get the New York accent down, lost weight for the role, dyed his hair blond and pierced his ears, but Pattinson says this type of commitment comes easy to him.

"When I find someone who I have an instinct about, who's going to just push forward, I find it quite easy to completely give myself to that person," he says in perhaps the most personal anecdote he gives in the interview. "And I can commit so wholeheartedly because I think it's so stressful being in a thing where you're just constantly second-guessing everything all the time."

As for his aversion to doing interviews, Pattinson explains that he actually doesn't want to clear up any misconceptions about himself or be heard. He acknowledges that he's "not very good at sending a message."

"I want to be misunderstood," he surprisingly says. "People are always changing, and the more you put something down in print, people form opinions and they're constantly creating who they think you are. If you do something that contradicts that, or if you do something which goes out of that box, then you can look like a liar or something like that."

GQ

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Despite being notoriously private, Pattinson did recently appear on Sirius XM's The Howard Stern Show, where he said he was "kind of" engaged to FKA Twigs.

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