How Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart successfully broke out of the Twilight teenybopper prison

If you really think about it, the Twilight movies were super weird. They have sparkling bloodsuckers, werewolf feuds and a half-human and half-vampire baby named Renesmee.

Most of us just didn’t see how bizarre they were because it was wrapped up in this angsty teenybopper package where the writing wasn’t great and the performances were a choice.

The fact it ran to five movies over four years automatically made it mainstream and, therefore, kind of lame.

The two heartthrobs at the centre of them? You may as well write them off. They’ll forever be associated with what will surely be their most famous characters, unable to break out of the box, attending fan conventions and charging bored mums nostalgic for their youth $60 for an autograph, $120 for a photo.

Only it didn’t happen that way.

Against the odds, Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart have assiduously worked with auteurs and carved out artistically interesting and successful post-Twilight careers in a way that probably no one in 2010 would’ve expected.

Pattinson has just released sci-fi film Mickey 17, where he plays two versions of a character, both oddballs in their own way, for Korean auteur and Oscar winner Bong Joon-ho. He’s really funny in it and worlds, planets even, from Twilight.

What’s important to note is that this was not a revelation. No one is surprised the guy who played brooding Edward Cullen was capable of such a feat, because Pattinson has spent more than a decade working with filmmakers like Bong that even a swerve back to big studio movies with The Batman and Tenet, couldn’t dent his indie cred.

Before he wrapped the Twilight franchise, Pattinson had already booked himself on the drama Cosmopolis, a spiky adaptation of a Don DeLillo book by provocateur filmmaker David Cronenberg. It debuted at Cannes, cementing its status as legitimate cinema.

He then spent time out in the Australian desert, shooting the violent western The Rover, David Michod’s follow-up to Animal Kingdom.

Pattinson would reunite with Michod for The King, where he gave a wild, mischievous performance as the French Dauphin in The King – it was as if Pattinson and his erratic energy was in a different movie to his co-stars but it worked.

There was another Cronenberg film (Map to the Stars), The Brutalist director Brady Corbet’s feature debut which was based on a Jean Paul Sartre short story (The Childhood of a Leader), and a historical drama with Werner Herzog (Queen of the Desert).

After Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2, Pattinson didn’t appear in a studio film until The King, which was for Netflix, in 2019.

There are three key films during this era that really declared the Brit was an actor who could easily disappear into characters and not just a former teen idol.

The first was Good Time, a chaotic crime caper by Josh and Benny Safdie which several critics said was a career-best performance for Pattinson. As a low-level crim, he was sweaty, nervy and commanding.

The next was High Life, French auteur Claire Denis’s (Beau Travail) strange and manic sci-fi thriller set aboard a prison transport spaceship on course for a black hole. Festival screenings prompted several walk-outs as it delved deeper into confronting beats.

Then there was Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, an absolutely raucous, disturbing and nausea-inducing black-and-white two-hander in which he and Willem Dafoe’s characters go crazy from isolation and cabin fever. His character may have copulated with an imaginary mermaid.

These are not the choices for a marquee star looking for easy rides and big pay cheques in starry vehicles in which he’s always well-lit.

When his agent told him that he had been approached for The Batman, his agent said, “I thought you just wanted to play total freaks all the time” to which Pattinson replied that Batman was just another freak.

The movie made almost $US800 million but Pattinson remained an indie darling. How about that.

Not to be outdone, Stewart is in post-production on the film adaptation of writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir, The Chronology of Water. She’s not appearing in the film, though, it’s her feature directorial debut after previously helming a short.

It’s not her only upcoming project in which she’s creatively involved behind the scenes. There’s also The Wrong Girls, which she co-wrote with her partner Dylan Meyer, with Meyer directing.

Last year, Stewart was in Love Lies Bleeding, a bold, feverish romantic noir thriller from Rose Glass, set in 1989 and centred on a lesbian relationship between a gym manager and a body builder. It premiered at Sundance, and ask the tastemakers in your life, they love it.

She played Jean Seberg, French New Wave icon and the target of a smear campaign by J. Edgar Hoover, in Australian filmmaker Benedict Andrews’ Seberg and had a supporting role in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women. There was the queer Christmas romp Happiest Season and the sci-fi horror Underwater.

But like Pattinson, there were three defining films that really showcased her talent, so that when her Charlie’s Angels remake underwhelmed, it didn’t even make a mark against Stewart.

Two of them were collaborations with French filmmaker Olivier Assayas. In The Clouds of Sils Maria, her character is a young assistant to an older international star actor (Juliette Binoche) with whom she has a thorny sexual tension. Stewart went on to win a Cesar award in the best supporting actress category, the first American to ever do so.

Stewart also gained a lot of notice for her second film with Assayas, Personal Shopper. A moody ghost story and meditation on loss and grief, Stewart’s performance is haunting and potent, and incredibly disciplined.

The capper, though, has to be Pablo Larrain’s Spencer. Portraying Princess Diana comes with enormous pressure, especially as an American.

It wasn’t a standard biopic, instead, it’s set in during the Christmas just before Charles and Diana’s separation, following her around the cold (in both senses of the word) Balmoral Castle as she struggles with her loss of confidence and self, consumed by the heartache of rejection and a failing marriage.

Stewart’s vulnerability and raw openness in this emotional character study earnt her an Oscar nomination.