14 DAY TRIAL // It’s been two years since Kristen Stewart was caught cheating on then-boyfriend Robert Pattinson, her co-star in “The Twilight Saga,” with a married man, and photos of the two making out in a parking lot were plastered all over the Internet. In a new interview with Esquire magazine, Pattinson opens up on the painful topic.
Since the affair, which presumably started on the set of “Snow White and the Huntsman” because that’s where she and Rupert Sanders, the director of the film, met, Kristen has managed to move past the scandal even though, at one point, it nearly threatened to end her career.
She and Robert even got back together briefly, with insiders saying that he loved her too much not to forgive her, but they eventually broke up for good. Industry pundits believe the reconciliation was actually a publicity stunt on behalf of Summit Entertainment, which feared the scandal might negatively affect the box office performance of the last installment of “Twilight.”
We might never know the truth of that, but Robert was affected by the scandal either way, he reveals. The worst part was that he doesn’t even understand why people would make this much fuss about it.
“[Stuff] happens, you know? It’s just young people… it’s normal! And honestly, who gives a [expletive]?” he tells Esquire.
“The hardest part was talking about it afterwards. Because when you talk about other people, it affects them in ways you can’t predict. It’s like that scene in Doubt [2008, in which Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a priest suspected of inappropriate behavior], where he’s talking about how to take back gossip? They throw all those feathers from a pillow into the sky and you’ve got to go and collect all the feathers,” Pattinson continues.
He does make a valid point: after the photos were released online and in various celebrity publications, even though Kristen apologized, and Robert and Rupert Sanders did their best to avoid questions from the media, the scandal kept growing by the day.
There was so much gossip making the rounds online that many fans even became convinced that the whole cheating photos had been faked to boost magazine sales, and that Kristen never stepped out on Robert.
For someone who values privacy as much as Robert does (and he said so various times), having to deal with this kind of scrutiny must be particularly difficult. Having to answer or even dodge questions about the scandal when out in public to promote his films must have been just as hard.
The full Esquire interview is available at the link. Robert can now be seen on the big screen opposite Guy Pearce in “The Rover,” out since June 20 in US theaters.