If nothing else, Robert Pattinson is the kind of actor who throws himself into every role he has. That means he’s lost weight and he’s bulked up for varying roles, putting his body through some pretty radical changes. But if you ask him, his least favorite aesthetic change for a movie role is much less physically arduous. It’s having to grow facial hair.
Most recently, Robert Pattinson sported a somewhat disheveled mustache for his performance in The Lighthouse. In a recent conversation, he shared his very blunt opinion about the experience of having facial hair, revealing,
The two times I've done a movie where I have had quite significant facial hair—I do not understand men who choose to do this to themselves. The idea of having a mustache as your go-to look for your whole life [means] you've got to be out of your mind. It's like having a stone in your shoe every day. You’re constantly sneezing, constantly covered in food. When we were in Nova Scotia, having a mustache definitely [helped you] fit in a little bit more with fishermen; I think you'd get more abuse if you didn't have one. It definitely does encourage you to have a whole bunch of different facial expressions. I think I was just constantly trying to keep my hairs out of my nostrils.
Ah, the things an artist will do for their craft. Though Robert Pattinson clearly has some disdain for beards, mustaches, and the like per his conversation with Vanity Fair, the actor has actually sported some kind of facial hair in more than just the two films he referenced. There was the scraggly beard he grew for 2016’s The Lost City of Z, and an equally bushy facial cover for 2015’s The Childhood of a Leader. He also replicated Salvador Dali’s legendary mustache when he played the surrealist painter in Little Ashes. Plus, he had some pretty stellar fuzz going on in 2018’s Good Time.
For a man who claims to despise the inconvenience of facial hair, he’s certainly been a good sport when it comes to growing it for roles -- as long as it makes sense for the part. It’s hard to argue that Robert Pattinson’s facial hair hasn’t helped him transform into his characters when the need arises. In The Lighthouse, for example, it just wouldn’t have been quite as believable that he was a man slowly unraveling under the pressure of living in isolation if he was always clean shaven.
Luckily, it seems like Robert Pattinson may get a bit of a break from growing out his facial hair. His next big project is, of course, The Batman, where he’ll be tasked with playing the impeccably clean cut billionaire Bruce Wayne. We’ll see him, hopefully beard-free, when the film hits theaters in 2021.
