THE ROOF IS ON FIRE!

HOT, SEXY, AND SINGLE ...not to mention English
Robert Pattinson (age 22)

April's GQ cover / interview excerpt:

"Pattinson hasn’t shot anything new since Twilight wrapped. He won’t be in front of the camera again until this spring, when he starts shooting the next Twilight movie, New Moon, due out in November. But in the meantime, he’ll show up as young Salvador Dalí in a period drama called Little Ashes, about the pre-fame bromance between Dalí, director Luis Buñuel, and poet Federico García Lorca.

Pattinson auditioned for the movie two years ago, during a post–Harry Potter, pre-Twilight career lull. He’d been thinking about putting acting aside to focus on music. (Two of his songs, including the Jeff Buckley–ish ballad “Never Think,” appear on the Twilight soundtrack.)

He’d read for the Lorca part, but when they asked him to play Dalí, he said yes. “I wanted to have a vacation in Spain,” he says. “But it became just—really, really hard. I’d never done a job that was so hard.”

There was no budget. Most of the crew spoke Spanish; Pattinson didn’t. He spent a lot of time by himself, trying to figure out how to play the part, worried he’d look like an idiot. (For what it’s worth, all that effort is up there on the screen. Pattinson’s Dalí starts out as a walleyed, puffy-shirted Simple Jack type before morphing into the twirly-mustachioed culture-hero Dalí of dorm-room-poster fame. It’s one of those movies in which you can tell Dalí’s having an aesthetic breakthrough because he starts pressing really hard when he paints.)

“In a lot of ways,” Pattinson says, “I was kind of crossing lines of what I thought I was comfortable doing. I had to do all this naked stuff.”

See, Little Ashes contains a fair amount of homoerotic activity, some of which is portrayed artfully and obliquely (Dalí and Lorca dive together in a moonlit sea) and some of which is, y’know, not (Lorca makes athletic, spiteful love to a woman while Dalí masturbates gloomily in a corner). It’s the kind of project you could imagine a guy in Pattinson’s place taking on post-Twilight as a way of telling the world he’s versatile and/or fearless. Except it wasn’t.

“I thought I’d never get another acting job again,” Pattinson says. “So I was like, ‘Yeah—why not try to do something weird?’ There’s all these gay sex scenes. And y’know, I haven’t even done a sex scene with a girl, in my whole career.”

(While he says this, he’s pinching the skin on the back of his left hand and sort of twisting it clockwise with his right.)

“And here I am, with Javier [Beltrán], who plays Lorca, doing an extremely hard-core sex scene, where I have a nervous breakdown afterward. And because we’re both straight, what we were doing seemed kind of ridiculous.”

(Now he’s sort of laughing.)

“Trying to do it doggie-style. Trying to have a nervous breakdown while doing it doggie-style. And it wasn’t even a closed set. There were all these Spanish electricians giggling to themselves.”

He’s pretty sure the only reason Little Ashes is getting any kind of promotional push is that he’s in it."