“The opposite. I still have the same terror when I walk past little kids and the soccer ball rips the way. I just have this terror of throwing it back, and I go back to being a 10-year-old kid, and I throws it in the wrong direction. People being like: wow! What an idiot! Eventually, I will probably have a child. So I started training to be a little… To be able to play football with a three-year-old child.

He feels himself aging every moment. “Thirty-five was definitely the year things changed. I really extended my teenage years to around 34,” he says as we jump into a black cab and start driving through Notting Hill. “I remember a few years ago talking to my friend on a nice street around here. Years ago I always thought it was so fussy, and now it seems so pleasant. I was like, I wonder what has changed in the area?

As he gets older, while closer, he begins to see his family in a new way, the “personality type delineation” in his parents, his father (the introverted, cynical, worried) to a end of the spectrum and his mother (the extrovert, the laughing, the emotionally accessible) to the other, and his sitting position in the middle of it, or, really, as he puts it: “Swinging from the one to another. The things that used to drive me crazy about my dad, being against the grain all the time, constantly playing devil’s advocate – I drift off that way.

Back home, closer to his family, Pattinson seems to be entering a new stage in his life and career. Although they made what could be called countless good decisions, they seem to have represented no obvious way forward. Which is a fact of life and career that firmly anchors Robert Pattinson in his micro-generation. There are in this very specific age range of people (i.e. those born in the mid-80s) who have grown up to see the old way – have seen it work from the lowest rung, since the entry level – before looking at the industry of their choice. disassemble over the last decade as they kind of climbed up a pile of old rubble and new shoots to get to the top of… what exactly? Many people his age, in many different job functions, will have encountered this existential shrug emoji and feel like throwing up. Pattinson is just old enough to have really seen what he wanted up close – he made a plan – to be confronted, when it was his turn, with the now obvious fact that absolutely no one has any idea what go follow. It’s exciting. It’s terrifying. That’s what’s so haunting about his haunting career sentiments: “I really thought that after Batman, I would be much more…”

Not too long ago, he was having a conversation with his manager about his paralysis and indecision about what to do next on all fronts, including his next movie. “I said, ‘I don’t want to make a mistake about what to do next. And then my manager said to me, ‘I understand that, but the longer you wait, the more you’re going to release a film before 2024. And by then, no one will give a fuck. What you do.’ It’s the weirdest thing that up until three years ago we kind of had the same traditional career path-ish. If all went well, it still kind of existed-ish. And now it’s like: what direction to take?