Shooting The Lighthouse was a pretty tough process for Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe and director Robert Eggers, but it seems like the movie affected the Twilight star the most.
Speaking to Esquire, Pattinson revealed the extreme lengths he went to in order to get into character as a lighthouse keeper.
While he didn’t go full method with the character, he did do some pretty weird things and as the character began to go mad, so did Pattinson.
“Because you’re playing a mad person, it means you can sort of be mad the whole time,” he said.
“Well, not the whole time, but for like an hour before the scene. You can literally just be sitting on the floor growling and licking up puddles of mud.”
And that’s not a joke, that is something he actually did.
He also got so drunk for scenes where the characters are intoxicated that he would pretty much blackout.
“[I was] basically unconscious the whole time. It was crazy.”
“I spent so much time making myself throw up. Pissing my pants. It’s the most revolting thing. I don’t know, maybe it’s really annoying.”
Pattinson described a scene where he took things too far, “There’s a scene where Willem’s kind of sleeping on me and we’re really, really drunk,” he explained.
“I felt like we’re completely lost in the scene and I’m sitting there trying to make myself gag and Robert [Eggers] told me off because Willem’s looking at him going: ‘If he throws up on me, I’m leaving the set.’ I had absolutely no idea this whole drama was unfolding.”
It sounds like it would have been particularly hard on Eggers, with the actor also explaining how he doesn’t like doing rehearsals and script read-throughs.
“I just couldn’t achieve what they wanted me to achieve in that room… Robert [Eggers] was getting furious with me because I was just sitting there, completely monotone the whole time. He could not stand it. I just don’t know how to perform it until we’re performing it.
“By the end of the week, I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to get fired before we’ve even started’. I definitely feel like, with the rehearsal period, we were quite angry with each other by the end of it. Literally, we’d finish for the day, I’d f***ing slam out the door and go home.”
Thankfully for Pattinson, he managed to get the performance out on set and reviews have been glowing. The Lighthouse currently sits at 94 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.