"The world’s favourite vampire is in Berlin for a whirlwind visit and, true to bloodsucking type, Robert Pattinson isn’t eating. Tonight, he will do the red-carpet thing for the world premiere of his new film, Bel Ami, but in the private hotel lounge allocated for this interview — “This is classy,” he comments as he strolls in — he barely makes a dent in the chicken salad he has ordered, despite his professed hunger.

Pattinson isn’t known for playing characters who do much smiling or laughing, either, so the first thing to notice is how readily he does both in person. Decked out in a black-grey ensemble and sporting a new cropped haircut under his black cap, he has barely sat down, with a pack of Camels by his side, before he’s folded up in mirth, talking about the KitKatClub, a notorious Berlin sex joint, and his desire to ­patronise it with his family. Is he joking? I hope not. “I was telling my dad about it last night, and he sounded really into it. ‘I’m coming over — let’s go to the orgy club.’ ”


The 25-year-old actor has been to Berlin many times. One of the best holidays he ever had was a stay in the east when he was 17, “before it was so gentrified”, ­frequenting bars that took up illegal residence in abandoned buildings. Such footloose times are seemingly in the past for the star of Twilight, although his desire to hit the KitKatClub may indicate otherwise. The other observation to make is that Pattinson is a very handsome man, but his face is less wide and flat than the camera makes it appear. And there are enough imperfections to separate him from the standard Hollywood pretty boy.

Nobody wants to see a dickhead succeed — that’s why I wanted to do it
It is easy to see why he is ideal casting as a heart-throb vampire, but equally why he got the role of Georges Duroy, the ­insatiable money-and-lust monster at the heart of Bel Ami. This adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s belle époque novel marks the directing debut of two of our most acclaimed theatre practitioners — Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, the founders of Cheek by Jowl. Of the projects Pattinson has chosen with the Twilight safety net in place, the first two, Remember Me (2010) and Water for Elephants (2011), were unadventurous romantic excursions, unlikely to ­perturb even the most rabid Twihard. Bel Ami is where it gets interesting.

Georges Duroy is essentially the anti-Edward Cullen, an opportunistic cad who deploys sex for ruthless gain, screwing people — literally, in the case of the rich society wives played by Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci and Kristin Scott Thomas — on his rise from impoverished soldier to powerful Parisian. Cullen is the charming, soulful vampire who gets the girl; Duroy is the charming, soulless parasite who gets everything but his own comeuppance. Pattinson nails his repellent, empty charm, sneering as he seduces.

Sticking closely to the Maupassant source is one of the many strengths of Donnellan and Ormerod’s gorgeously ­realised vision, and Pattinson admits that tweaking Twilight-fuelled preconceptions was an original lure. “But my ideas about it changed as I was doing it,” he says. “Georges keeps getting beaten down by the world, but he never learns. He succeeds because of the bad points of his personality. Nobody wants to see a dickhead succeed — that’s why I wanted to do it.”

For their part, Donnellan and Ormerod are predictably effusive about their star: the former praises his “passionate attachment to us” during the film’s difficult financing, and credits him with “edge and intelligence”. “There’s a huge difference between Georges and Rob,” Donnellan says. “Georges rises to the top with no ­talent. Rob has masses of it.” (Donnellan sees Bel Ami as a parable on modern celebrity culture.) They also attribute the idea for a five-week theatre-style rehearsal process to the actor, a savvy move that allowed him to soak up their reservoir of knowledge about performance and period. He showed up every day for 10 or 11 hours. “I ended up doing mime and crazy improvisations, because you run out of stuff to do,” he says. “One day, Holliday [Grainger, his co-star] and I ran around screaming at each other for four hours.” Pattinson can’t articulate how the process fed into his performance, although when he arrived on set in ­Budapest in February 2010, he was ­worried he had overcooked it.

Meanwhile, Ormerod and Donnellan were taking the baby steps that come with being debut film-makers. The former focused on the design tapestry, the latter on the actors. Pattinson recalls them putting a row of audience heads at the bottom of the monitor, but the graceful story­telling they bring to Bel Ami bodes well for their move from stage to cinema. “We’re now rather bitten, I’m afraid,” Donnellan says.

Published in 1885, Maupassant’s masterpiece was shocking in its day. The author knew he was on borrowed time while writing this, his second novel — he eventually succum­bed to syphilis — and it is infected by a spirit of nihilistic hedonism, of indulging base instincts while you can because, as the antireligious Duroy puts it: “This is the only life; there’s nothing after.” Pattinson wishes they had kept a shot near the end where Georges turns to a crucifix and thanks God for his good fortune. “It was done in the most blas­phemous way,” he says, “thinking of God as Father Christmas, which was funny. There’s a lot of misery in the movie. It’s not as funny as I thought it was going to be.”"

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