Most of you know Charlie Heaton best for playing Jonathan Byers on the hit Netflix series Stranger Things, but in less than two months, we’ll finally get to see his performance as Samuel Guthrie, a.k.a. Cannonball, in the long-awaited The New Mutants. It looks like Heaton has a bright future as an actor ahead of him, and if he has his way, that career will eventually start looking like Robert Pattinson’s, at least when it comes to being able to pick a variety of different projects.
When recently asked if there’s anyone he’d like to model his career after, Charlie Heaton responded:
Not in an aspect where it’s like, Wow, I want to be Robert Pattinson. But having seen him come off this huge show [the Twilight franchise] he’s made these really interesting choices. He’s done The Lighthouse, and he did Good Time. Obviously now he’s doing Batman, but I think he’s chosen to work with interesting directors, and I feel a lot of respect for him.
Robert Pattinson certainly has built quite the unique resume over the last 15 years. Several years after his time as Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Pattinson was catapulted to worldwide fame for playing Edward in the Twilight series, which is arguably where most people still know him best from.
However, since that vampire saga concluded, Robert Pattinson has primarily acted in smaller/independent movies, like Cosmopolis, Good Time, Life, The Lost City of Z and The Lighthouse. Now he’s jumping back into the world of blockbusters by playing The Batman’s eponymous protagonist, taking over the role from Ben Affleck, and as Charlie Heaton noted, Pattinson clearly has good taste when it comes to the filmmakers he chooses to work with, Matt Reeves being the latest among them.
Granted, that’s not to say that all of Robert Pattinson’s post-Twilight movies have been critical darlings, but overall, Charlie Heaton is impressed with where Pattinson’s taken his career and would like to follow a similar path, one where typecasting isn’t an issue. As he also mentioned during his chat with Esquire:
They see you as one thing, and you continue to do that. Do you want to play this really awkward, offbeat outsider? Yeah. I can—but I can do other things. It’s having people trust that you can do other things, or proving it to them.
“Awkward, offbeat outsider” is certainly an accurate description for Jonathan Byers in Stranger Things, although the character is certainly more confident now compared to back in Season 1. And while we haven’t see The New Mutants yet, “outsider” is definitely applicable to Cannonball and the movie’s other main protagonists given their status as mutants. Still, for any casting directors out there, Charlie Heaton wants it known that he’s capable of playing other kinds of roles.
Among the ways Charlie Heaton has worked to diversify his resume is by co-starring alongside Catherine Keener in an addiction drama and appearing in the upcoming horror movie The Souvenir Part II. It’ll be interesting to see what other projects he picks in the coming years, but for now, we’re not far off from finally seeing what Heaton brought to the table in The New Mutants, which he shot back in summer 2017.
The New Mutants opens in theaters on November 10, and while Stranger Things Season 4 doesn’t have a premiere date yet, it is currently shooting. As for Robert Pattinson, he’s currently shooting The Batman, which will arrive on June 25, 2021, but he can be seen later this year in Tenet and The Devil All the Time.
Don’t forget to look through our 2020 release schedule to learn what other movies open later this year.
