Like wizards, vampires, and Batman, many of Robert Pattinson‘s offbeat stories doled out during dutiful press interviews are in fact, not real.
While the actor’s penchant for fibbing is well-known by now, even Pattinson surprises himself every once in a while by how he masterfully spins tall tales. During an interview with The New York Times Style Magazine published Wednesday, Pattinson revisited a 2011 interview during which he told a bewildered Matt Lauer on live television a completely made-up story about seeing a clown die in a little car explosion as a kid.
“There was absolutely no hesitation at all [in my voice],” Pattinson told the Times. “I’m like, ‘What on earth? Are you possessed?’” He explained that during this time in his career “the only thing people would ever ask me about was being famous” and “you go into, like, a fugue state.”
It’s a topic Pattinson has pondered before, and he once told Willem Dafoe for Interview that he gets “a certain high from it.” “There’s a little gremlin inside of me that thinks, ‘Just say something shocking. You’re only here for a few minutes, say something terrible,’” said Pattinson. “There’s a kind of perverse glee I get from that. But I’ve given my publicist a number of heart attacks.”
So, in the spirit of humoring that little Gremlin, here’s a rundown of some of Pattinson’s most memorable deceptions and dubious claims.
Note: This is a limited list and not all lies have been accounted for.
He invited a stalker to dinner, then bored her so much that she stopped following him
While appearing on the Late Show With David Letterman in 2009, Pattinson said that while he was in Spain filming Little Ashes, a girl waited outside his apartment every day. “I was so chronically bored,” the actor said. “That one day, she’d been out there for about three weeks, and I said, ‘Hey, do you just want to go to dinner or something? I mean, no one else wants to hang out with me.’”
Pattinson detailed that the pair went to her parents’ restaurant where he proceeded to complain “about everything in my life for about two hours, and then she gave me the bill at the end.” The romance was short-lived and she was never seen outside his apartment again.
While this one hasn’t been debunked, Pattinson reputation for spinning late-night tales but this in the highly unlikely bin.
He doesn’t wash his hair
That same year, Pattinson told Extra that he didn’t “really see the point in washing your hair” and he didn’t “care if it’s clean or not.” He pressed on: “It’s like, I don’t clean my apartment ’cause I don’t care. I have my apartment for sleeping in and I have my hair for just, you know, hanging on my head. I don’t care whether it’s clean or not.”
While his remarks inspired a host of rumors that he never showered and was suspiciously smelly on the set of New Moon, Pattinson has since dispelled the spell. In a delightful bit of breaking news, the Twilight veteran admitted to the Wall Street Journal that he “was a brush-your-teeth-and-have-a-shower kind of guy.”
He had a gig as a women’s hand model
While promoting the Twilight saga, Pattinson would pepper talk show interviews with mentions of a past life as a women’s hand model. Then, when stopping by Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2011, the late-night host challenged the actor’s story, calling on Pattinson’s mother in the audience to vouch for her son. His mother vehemently shook her head when asked to confirm, however, snipping the yarn then and there.
Not being able to help himself, Pattinson quipped, “I’ve done a lot of butt modeling, which you have no idea. You can’t refute that.”
His 18th birthday was wrapped in an April Fool’s prank
Pattinson told Seth Meyers in 2014 that his sisters told him on his 18th birthday, which happened to be on April Fool’s Day, that he mother was pregnant. “I went to school just being like rejoicing and basking in the fact that I can have a mini-me,” he said. “I was so convinced. It was the most disappointed I’ve ever been my life.” Notably, Pattinson’s birthday falls on May 13.
He stopped working out to play the Caped Crusader
Pattinson sparked internet outrage in 2020 when he told GQ that he was no longer hitting the gym to prepare for his role in for Matt Reeves’ The Batman, and said that he had ditched his trainer hired by the film studio. “I think if you’re working out all the time, you’re part of the problem,” he told the magazine. “You set a precedent. No one was doing this in the Seventies. Even James Dean — he wasn’t exactly ripped.” With a sigh, he added: “Literally, I’m just barely doing anything.”
Two years later, Pattinson addressed the dry workout joke. “That really came back to haunt me,” he told MovieMaker. “I just always think it’s really embarrassing to talk about how you’re working out. I think it’s like an English thing. Unless you are in the most unbelievable shape, where people are just genuinely curious, going, ‘How have you achieved, like, physical perfection?’ or whatever.”
Pattinson stated the obvious, “You’re playing Batman. You have to work out. I think I was doing the interview when I was in lockdown, as well, in England … I was in a lower gear of working out.”
He also took the opportunity to once again mention that he, in fact, does wash his hair. “It’s the same thing as saying in an interview when I was like 21 that I didn’t wash my hair,” he recalled. “It just sticks for 15 years.”
He was a floppy disc-slinging drug dealer
In perhaps one of his oldest — some may say classic — lies, Pattinson admitted in a 2022 GQ interview that he once postured as a drug dealer to impress a girl. “I haven’t thought about this in years, but during secondary school my first proper-ish kind of girlfriend was a few years above me, and I always wanted to hang out with the cool kids, who were in the oldest year,” he explained. “And some of us decided that I’d pretend that I was importing drugs. But I didn’t even know what drugs looked like.”
To remedy the predicament, Pattinson rounded up 40 floppy disks. “I had this idea I’d get floppy disks, open up the floppy disk, pour this kind of powder stuff inside, and then spray it with, like, some kind of cleaning product so that it’d smell chemical-y, and seal all of it in,” he said. “I’d show it to kids who were probably 15 or 16, and I’d be like: Yeah, I’m importing drugs in floppy discs.”
