Robert Pattinson Strongly Endorses Fatherhood, Instant Coffee, and Salmon

Welcome back to Strongly Endorses, our occasional feature on the everyday things that celebrities are really into.

Robert Pattinson has endorsed Dior’s best-selling Homme fragrance for more than a decade at this point, but when he tapped in with GQ over Zoom, he still can’t put the nuances of different aromas into words. “I just don't have any of the language to describe scent at all,” he said. “I even have like, press notes, of what to say. And I'm literally like…nice!”

The 38-year-old actor is, of course, one of the great movie stars of his generation, with an unrivaled flexibility that allows him to balance work in blockbusters like Twilight and The Batman with intense performances in indie films like Good Time and The Lighthouse. So while he was nervous about endorsing cologne at first (“It was not really the thing to do in 2012”), when asked to to star in Homme’s first ad, he was was drawn to the challenge of embodying something as abstract as a fragrance—and the chance to work with the French director Romain Gavras, who was at that point best known for music videos like M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls” and Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild.”

“There was something in the music videos I just really loved—they kind of had a sense of pathos and humor to them, and physicality—there was one with an amazing dance sequence,” he told me. “I was like, Oh, there's something that'd be really interesting to do about freedom in your body and stuff like that.”

Hearing Pattinson talk, you quickly understand why he’s a good “face” for a cologne even if he couldn’t tell you what it smells like, exactly. Most recently, he appeared in a short to promote Homme Parfum, the newest variation of the scent. We talk about that as well as a few other things that he should he be the face of.

“I definitely endorse hyper-loading caffeine right at the beginning of the day. You just need to basically live your entire day in a kind of manic state. But I can't do Celsius— it's too much. That feels like I've kind of gotten on a roller coaster and I can't get off it.

My favorite thing is instant coffee, more than anything else. It's very English. I like it when it looks like oil—that’s what my espresso is, just barely dissolved coffee granules.”

“I'm kind of like a kid. I'm doing a lot of jobs in a row and I get very obsessed about needing to have regimented behavior—otherwise I'd feel crazy afterwards. But I was having lunch yesterday and I was like, I can't taste salmon anymore. And I realized I've eaten nothing but salmon for like, months. It's like I have a seal’s diet: I genuinely have been eating salmon three times a day.

I used to only eat tuna out of a can when I was working—I just put Cholula hot sauce on a can of tuna. Someone saw me doing it once and they were like, that's absolutely disgusting. And then suddenly I kind of got afraid of mercury poisoning, so I switched to salmon. Someone told me I could just get mercury poisoning from salmon anyway. But yeah: I endorse.”

“I don't really like scents that you can identify easily—or even identify that you're wearing a scent. This one is deceptively simple. Uncluttered. It's weird, especially after a while, it doesn't really smell like perfume, it just has a kind of aura around it. It kind of combines with your own scent and just smells very natural.

But yeah, it's funny, I quite like doing these interviews to French journalists because I can just kind of say random words and someone has to just translate them and you sound way more pretentious. I like that.”

“I was like, why am I always so stiff all the time? And then this one trainer I work with showed me this thing in the gym—I don't even know what the machine's called. But you do a hip stretch by sitting with your legs as wide apart as you can on a bench and using a weight to stretch your hips. Absolutely life-changing. I genuinely feel like it has given me like an extra 10 years of life.”

“I don't wanna charge anything! I find it extremely upsetting that they've stopped making nice headphones with wires. It’s literally impossible to get them. I don't want to wear in-ear headphones. The fact that you can't have headphones that last for an entire flight? It’s absolutely crazy, but that’s the reality.

I have quite strange-shaped ear holes and so the Apple ones don't stay [in] for me. Shure used to do these running headphones—they were my favorite ones, but they literally don't make them anymore, and the idea of buying used headphones on eBay is a little bit too gross for me. Like, that's where my line is. Now the only ones available are the cheapest possible headphones, which is really annoying. I just wish—if there's any headphone companies out there that want to do a retro…I could be the face of shitty wired headphones.”

“It is weird: Until you have a kid, talking about kids? You're like, I don't care about your kid at all. Literally the only thing it represents is you're just not gonna hang out anymore. And then as soon as you have one you're like, Oh, this is, like, way better than hanging out with my friend anyway. [Pattinson’s fiancé Suki Waterhouse gave birth to their first child in March of last year.]

It opens up a huge world! I've been such a hermit—like, I never really met my neighbors before. And now because you're just constantly, like, in the playground all the time? I'm just hanging out with my neighbors. There's something so lovely about going to a random person's house just because they have a kid around the same age and having, like, daytime hangouts. I can't actually believe it's happening to me, but like, having a barbecue on Sunday and saying like, ‘You, uh … you watch the game?’ I was like, this is dope. I love this.”