Four Robert Pattinsons are better than one, and that makes his upcoming Oscar run a bit more complicated. In “Primetime,” Pattinson sits alone in a dim Florida room, reading a stranger’s chat logs aloud: “I will undress you as you undress me.” He’s playing Chris Hansen, host of the hidden-camera series “To Catch a Predator,” the man who turned police stings into television events that battled for ratings against the likes of ABC’s “Lost.” It’s the most uncomfortable thing Pattinson has ever done on screen (yet). It could also be what finally gets him an Oscar nomination.
At 40, he’s yet to be recognized despite acclaimed turns in “Good Time,” “The Lighthouse” and “The Rover.” This year, Pattinson has stacked the deck. The evidence is all over the 2026 film year: indies, franchises and, in the middle of it all, shooting the next “Batman” movie with Matt Reeves. In Lance Oppenheim’s “Primetime,” which played in competition at Venice (earning a seven-minute standing ovation) and opens Sept. 25 through A24, Pattinson has what looks like his clearest awards vehicle.
Kristoffer Borgli’s dark comedy “The Drama” gave him another showcase opposite Zendaya back in the spring. Then came Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” which became one of the year’s billion-dollar phenomena. And still to come, on Dec. 18, Denis Villeneuve’s final installment, “Dune: Part Three,” will give him a showier, villainous supporting turn as the shape-shifting Scytale.
Four movies, two possible categories and two very different campaigns to juggle. Nobody’s asking anymore whether Pattinson belongs in the race. The question is how the studios — and Pattinson — choose to play it.
Oppenheim, a documentarian who also helmed the Telluride surprise documentary “You Can See Everything” alongside Nathan Fielder, is making his narrative feature debut. His Hansen is a showman, the connective tissue of an anti-hero origin story à la “Joker” with Joaquin Phoenix and “American Psycho” with Christian Bale. The film isn’t out to canonize him.
Instead, it watches everything that made him larger than the premise of the show: the ratings, the crew, the wannabe actors playing decoys and the audience who gobbled it up at home. Pattinson doesn’t ask anyone to root for Hansen, rather he asks them to sit with a man they’ve known from television and watch him squirm. We’ve seen a character get embraced like this before.
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