Robert Pattinson’s 5 Weirdest Movie Accents, Ranked

Some things in life are just certain. Death. Taxes. Robert Pattinson affecting a weird accent in a movie. So, which ones are his absolute weirdest? The competition is pretty tough, if I’m being honest.

Pattinson’s accent work isn’t just some running bit; as he told Terry Gross and NPR in 2019, it’s an essential part of his process. After saying that he and his friends spent their childhoods listening to American rap music and mimicking the accents, Pattinson continued, “And still to this day, I mean, whenever I’m doing a movie or a character in an English accent, I mean, I find — I literally feel like I’m naked. And I can’t — I’m incapable of doing my normal voice in a character. It just doesn’t come out at all. It’s — every single time I read something, the first thing to change is — has something to do with my voice. It kind of — it just does it naturally. And I think there’s — I find a kind of deep pleasure in doing accents as well.”

The fact that Pattinson’s inclination to adopt increasingly strange accents for his wide variety of roles is actually incredibly important to him as an actor doesn’t mean he doesn’t clearly enjoy, as Danny DeVito’s Frank Reynolds once put it, “[getting] real weird with it.” The hype over Pattinson’s zany voice work only intensified after the trailer for Bong Joon-ho’s new movie “Mickey 17” dropped, featuring Pattinson adopting a wild, almost whiny voice as the titular Mickey. Question is, which are his best weird accents from his previous movies and, again, which one is the weirdest?

It feels unfair to say that Robert Pattinson’s accent in Matt Reeves’ 2022 reboot “The Batman” is weird, per se, but it is a pretty great addition to the hall of fame of Batman voices. As the first person to play the Caped Crusader since Ben Affleck — who portrayed the character in the DC Extended Universe movies “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” “Suicide Squad,” and “Justice League” — Pattinson had pretty enormous shoes to fill, and he does an excellent job stepping into a completely different version of the masked vigilante. But what about his voice?

As Pattinson told Access Hollywood in a 2019 interview, he took inspiration from his then-recent co-star Willem Dafoe for Bruce Wayne (and keep that in mind, because that’s not the last time Dafoe is going to come up on this list). “”Willem’s voice in [‘The Lighthouse’] was quite inspiring for it, to be honest,” Pattinson told his interviewer. “It is pretty similar, the voice I’m gonna do, to Willem’s.” To be so honest, I don’t really get a whole lot of Dafoe in Pattinson’s “Batman” voice; it feels more like he put Christian Bale and Michael Keaton’s Batman voices in a blender and created a mélange of sorts, and it really, really works. It doesn’t feel campy, but it also feels heightened somehow. Even though the second “Batman” movie starring Pattinson has been delayed, it’s safe to say the actor will bring his Batman’s excellent vocal stylings back to the big screen whenever it does come out.

If you forgot about “The Devil All The Time,” that’s perfectly forgivable. Released in September of 2020 — when we were all still locked in our homes as the COVID-19 virus raged across the world — the movie hit Netflix and didn’t exactly blow critics away in the process. If there’s one memorable thing about “The Devil All the Time,” though, it’s Robert Pattinson’s absolutely ridiculous accent as Reverend Preston Teagarden, a self-important preacher in Knockemstiff, Ohio who preys on much younger women (like Lenora, a high schooler played by “Sharp Objects” and “Little Women” star Eliza Scanlen). Preston Teagarden is a creepy, unsettling man, and the high-pitched Southern accent Pattinson brings to the character is oddly perfect. It’s also jarring to hear this completely weird voice leave his mouth.

According to an interview with the film’s writer and director Antonio Campos in Insider around its release, Pattinson staunchly refused to get any help with the accent. “Rob was impossible to get dialect coaching,” Campos told the outlet. “He just didn’t want to do it. He was just adamant about figuring it out on his own.” Still, as Campos put it, he completely trusted the actor: “There was no way in my mind that he wasn’t going to come on set with something bad. I might not have dug it, but it wasn’t going to be bad. I’d rather have someone come with something weird that’s a choice than something that isn’t thought out. So I knew he would come with something interesting.” Well, if Campos wanted weird from Pattinson as Preston, he definitely got what he wanted.

Robert Pattinson is not the star of the Netflix original movie “The King,” but his oddball vocal performance steals the show every time he’s on screen. It’s unbelievably silly, if I’m being frank. The guy sounds like Pepe le Pew, not a high-status French dauphin (which means prince) warring against the movie’s titular monarch King Henry V, otherwise known as Hal (played by Timothée Chalamet). Hal runs afoul of the Dauphin in person only a few times throughout the runtime of “The King,” but whenever he’s on screen, you just want to giggle at him. He’s clearly having a blast with this cartoonish French accent, and the best part is that, as he revealed in an interview, the whole accent emerged from a bit Pattinson made up to please himself and himself alone.

“I’d been trying to do [a French accent] seriously, but then I was talking to someone at Dior and I started mimicking them and doing it in this funnier way,” Pattinson told GQ in February of 2022. “I started doing it as a joke at first, but then I filmed myself and watched it back, and thought this actually kinda works.” It does work, in a totally bizarre way; while it makes the Dauphin seem absurd in person, it serves as a perfect contrast to how formidable he and his forces are in battle as they attack Hal and his army. Robert Pattinson is a genius, is what I’m saying.

Robert Pattinson’s accent in Robert Eggers’ 2019 film “The Lighthouse” is definitely the least weird thing about the movie as a whole, but every time he opens his mouth, the strangest noise comes out, which is to say that the British-born actor offers up his best interpretation of a New England sailor. Sure, Willem Dafoe, who plays the lighthouse keeper Ephraim Wicklow to Pattinson’s sailor Thomas Wake, has the more distinctive accent; it’s easy to see here how and why Pattinson used his co-star’s vocal performance as an influence for “The Batman.” Still, I cannot possibly undersell how odd Pattinson sounds when he talks, largely because his Maine inflection seems vaguely British. While that could be chalked up to the fact that Pattinson is British and perhaps (incorrectly) understood as his inability to grasp this accent, he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2020 that it was very deliberate.

“It’s literally — no one believes me — but to my ear, it’s a very particular Maine accent, and if you listen to people from these coastal regions of Maine, it’s this really weird accent that came from sailors, there’s a bit of Liverpudlian in it. It’s such a strange amalgam,” Pattinson said before revealing that people listening to him speak did think he was just doing it wrong until he double-checked with people from the New England state. “We had three people from Maine listening to it and they were like, ‘Yeah,’ and I was like, ‘Yes! I didn’t mess it up!”‘ “The Lighthouse” is one of Pattinson’s most jarring performances for many reasons — Dafoe even apparently wanted Pattinson to tone things down when he kept forcing himself to puke on set — but the voice is a vital factor.

It’s a really, really bold move to basically do a Willem Dafoe impression in an animated film that also features Willem Dafoe, but in “The Boy and the Heron,” that’s basically what Robert Pattinson is doing. Also, it rules. In “The Boy and the Heron,” a masterful movie from Hayao Miyazaki that could be the director’s swan song, Pattinson appears in the movie’s English dub as one half of the title — the heron whose exterior masks a strange little birdman voiced by the actor — and when I first saw this stunning film, I thought he was Dafoe for a second. (Dafoe also appears in the film, albeit much more briefly than Pattinson, as Noble Pelican.)

The fact that Pattinson, Dafoe, and other major stars like Christian Bale and Florence Pugh appear only in the English language version of “The Boy and the Heron” doesn’t mean they’re in some lesser version of the movie; far from it. In fact, as David Ehrlich revealed in IndieWire around the film’s release, the New York-based company GKIDS worked particularly hard to ensure that the dubbed English version of Miyazaki’s semi-autobiographical fairytale was just as astounding as the Japanese version. Apparently, Rodney Uhler of GKIDS was blown away when he first heard Pattinson’s take on the Gray Heron, voiced by Masaki Suda in the Japanese version. “He knew he could do it,” Uhler told Ehrlich, “and he showed up and delivered magic.” He sure did. Pattinson’s vocal performance is one of the most memorable parts of “The Boy and the Heron,” which is really saying something.