Robert Pattinson Had To Explain To ‘Twilight’ Fan That He’s Still Acting: “I’m Batman”

With a DC franchise and films from Christopher Nolan, Robert Eggers and the Safdie brothers under his belt, some people will still always know Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen.

The actor, who made his breakout performance in the 2008 feature adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, had a recent fan encounter with someone who thought he’d gone into early retirement after the five-film franchise concluded in 2012.

In an interview with The New York Times, Pattinson recalled an airport employee recently asking him, “Hey, you’re the guy from Twilight. Why’d you stop acting?”

“I was like … ‘I’m Batman?’” he recounted. “She just laughed.”

Pattinson and Kristen Stewart starred as 104-year-old vampire Edward and his teen girlfriend Bella Swan in the book-to-film saga, which included New Moon (2009), Eclipse (2010), Breaking Dawn — Part 1 (2011) and Breaking Dawn — Part 2 (2012).

After making his DC debut as Bruce Wayne in The Batman (2022), Pattinson is set to reunite with writer-director Matt Reeves on the sequel, which they intend to shoot in 2025.

Reeves previously gave an update on his plans to turn The Batman into a trilogy. “Yes, that is still the plan. I mean, it’s sticking very closely to the path we envisioned,” he told Collider in September.

“Things kind of shifted. So, when we came up with the idea to do The Penguin, that was something where I had always intended to continue Penguin’s story, and wanted to tell this story of his beginning of rise to power,” said Reeves of the Max spin-off series. “Because we know that he’s introduced in The Batman as a kind of mid-level, sort of overlooked, mocked figure, who’s not yet in anyone’s eyes the kingpin we come to know him as in the lore.”

Reeves added, “And so, that was deliberate because I wanted— whereas it wasn’t Batman’s origin story, I wanted the origin stories of these other characters, of the Rogues Gallery and that story was originally going to be the entrée into the next movie.”