Actor Robert Pattinson has tried as hard as possible to distance himself from his leading role in the Twilight franchise. To do so, Pattinson sought unusual roles, with his desire to play Bruce Wayne, AKA The Batman, coming as a surprise even to his agents. Well, while speaking with Total Film, Pattinson has explained that there is no difference between his recent affinity for the peculiar and The Dark Knight, declaring that The Batman “is a freak.”

While Batman is, of course, among the pantheon of the all-time superhero greats, it’s hard to deny that a man who dresses up like a bat and obsessively punches people is a freak. He, at the very least, has freak-like tendencies. So, despite Robert Pattinson’s avoidance of comic book movie roles, The Batman fits nicely into his body of work.

“I just kept obsessively checking up on it for the next year or so. Even my agents were like, ‘Oh, interesting. I thought you only wanted to play total freaks?’ And I was like, ‘He is a freak!’”

MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY

Pattinson has wanted the role of The Batman for some time, with the actor revealing that he is just as much a fan of the iconic character as the rest of us. “Out of all the comic-book characters and that kind of movie, I’ve seen every single one of the [Batman] movies in the cinema, which I can’t really say I’ve done for any other series,” he said. “I was always really looking forward to them coming out. There was the combination of just being so attracted to it, but also feeling like it’d had a lot of movies made about it, and none of them are bad movies. People kind of shit on some of them, but they’re not actually bad. They all kind of completely achieve what they set out to achieve, and they’re all really interesting, according to their time and place. I don’t know. I just had a weird instinct about it. But I’ve always loved the character.”

“I was aiming for quite different stuff. Obviously it’s basically the jewel in the crown, of the parts you can really get as an actor. But I’d never really thought I was anywhere close to doing it, and especially with the other parts I was attracted to at the time.”

Matt Reeves Saw The Batman Casting Backlash Coming

     Warner Bros. Pictures

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the casting of Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne came with a cavalcade of backlash. Thankfully, director Matt Reeves saw it coming, knowing that it wouldn’t matter to those who have seen the actor’s work outside of the Twilight Saga. “There has been no actor, when his announcement that he was going to be playing Batman in one of the feature films was announced, that has not received a backlash,” Reeves said. “The people who were excited, I knew it was because they knew Rob’s work post-Twilight. The people who weren’t excited, I knew it was because they didn’t know Rob’s work post-Twilight.”

Following The Batman during his second year of fighting crime, the movie finds the DC hero tackling The Riddler and uncovering corruption that connects to his own family during the investigation. The Batman is scheduled for release on March 4, 2022.