Batman: Pattinson had to lie to Christopher Nolan about his audition

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

When it comes to Christopher Nolan, we've become accustomed to just how closely guarded…well, everything about his projects becomes, but the director isn't the only one who needs to keep secrets. Robert Pattinson stars in Nolan's upcoming TENET alongside John David Washington, but it was in the midst of shooting TENET that a Batman Pattinson connection began when he got the call to screen test for Matt Reeves' THE BATMAN, another film which deals in secrets.

Robert Pattinson recently spoke with The Irish Times about TENET, and revealed that he had to lie right to Christopher Nolan's face when he needed to leave the set to do the Batman screen test. Unfortunately, Pattinson isn't quite as skilled at deception as Nolan seems to be.

It’s funny because Chris is so secretive about everything to do with his movies. And then I had to be really secretive about Batman stuff. So I had to lie to Chris about having to go for a screen test – I said I had a family emergency. And as soon as I said ‘it’s a family emergency’ he said: ‘You’re doing the Batman audition, aren’t you?’

You can't pull the wool over Nolan's eyes. Although Robert Pattinson obviously knows more about TENET than us at this point, he was still discovering what the film meant up until the very end. "When I first read it both Chris and Emma were saying: did you read this properly because everyone else took another two hours?" Pattinson said. "And I said: Oh s**t. Right up until the last week of the shoot, I was talking to John David (Washington) and asking him some pretty fundamental questions about who my character was. And John David was like: ‘Wait, you don’t know this?’ But it’s complicated! You’re not just being fed the story." Pattinson continued, saying, "You’re trying to uncover the mystery at the same time as the characters in the movie are. A lot of the stuff in this movie is expositional world-building stuff and a dense story. And the script makes that accessible to a layman. And that’s really difficult to get that balance of making it sound like natural dialogue and trying to get across information that you probably need a PhD to understand properly. And then you have to put it in the mouth of someone like me, who can barely add."

TENET will be released in a rather unconventional way as the film is slated to roll out in international territories such as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the United Kingdom on August 26th, before hitting select theaters in the U.S. on September 3rd. As for THE BATMAN, the film is still slated to hit theaters on October 1, 2021, but that all depends on when production resumes.