One of the most intense movies of the year, The Lighthouse, features plenty of strange, surreal, and downright uncomfortable moments of star Robert Pattinson. That didn’t stop the actor from giving these scenes his all — even when it meant furiously masturbating on set.
In the film, Pattinson’s cable knit sweater enthusiast/lighthouse keeper is seen masturbating in a shed. Thanks to the shooting schedule, that intense scene was the first one on the agenda. Pattinson, a very dedicated actor who will likely not have to do scenes like this when he starts shooting The Batman, brought his A-game.
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“On day one we shot Rob masturbating in the shed — it’s the very first thing we shot — and Rob really, really went for it,” Robert Eggers, the film’s director, told The Daily Beast. “And you know, it was inspiring.”
Eggers may have felt “inspired” by Pattinson’s performance, but the actor admitted to The New York Times that the on-camera performance was a “180” of everything they worked on in rehearsal and that Eggers was “a little in shock” upon witnessing it.
“I was like, ‘Okay, cool, I didn’t get told to stop, so I’ll keep going in that direction,’” Pattinson told the outlet of the scene.
The reason his faux-masturbating looked so different, he told The New York Times in a new profile, was because of his method of performing.
“I want to do it different every time, and if you rehearse it 30 times, you have to think of 30 different ways to do it — even if the first way is probably the best way,” he said. “I just hate it when I do a second take exactly the same as the first take. They might as well fire me.”
Getting a little weird probably didn’t bother Eggers too much. After all, this is the man who, along with his brother Max, researched shark genitals to get the Lighthouse’s mermaid vagina exactly “right,” according to The Daily Beast.
There really is a lid for every pot.
The Lighthouse hits theaters October 18, 2019.