Coming HOMME

Vanities / Beauty

ROBERT PATTINSON has been the face of Dior Homme for more than a decade. With a brand-new fragrance campaign and a leading role in Mickey 17, the actor takes a moment to reflect

Savannah Walsh

ROBERT PATTINSON'S STAR is back in orbit. Before returning to the big screen this spring in Mickey 17, a sci-fi dark comedy from Oscar-winning filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, he appears as a sensual Everyman in a new Dior Homme campaign.

Pattinson rocketed to global fame in the Twilight series, and that vampire vibe—dark, moody, enigmaticshaped his early days in the spotlight. But when he turns up on Zoom in a Supreme hoodie, his hair standing in all directions, it all seems to rest more lightly on his shoulders. "Everyone has some level of impostor syndrome, but for many years I was very envious of people who I perceived as feeling very comfortable in their own skin, especially when they're performing. Why can't I just feel like that? Maybe it's just a natural gift and I wish I could be like that, blah blah blah. I spent a long time trying to get rid of anxiety," he says. "And I guess after many years of doing something, you realize, Oh, you can't really get rid of the anxiety, but you can turn it around and use it as energy. My insecurities about everything as a performer became my radar for what to do."

After working with Dior for 10-plus years, Pattinson has even grown to embrace being the face of a fragrance. "I was very clear about what I wanted to do on the first [campaign] because I really knew what I didn't want to do: a looking-into-the-camera, heyyy sexy fragrance thing," he says with a laugh. "So it has this energy where you're fighting against it. I've kind of settled into it a little bit more, so I guess there's more sensuality. It feels more grown. There's a romanticism to it, which is sort of quite sweet."

Dior's latest scent is a reimagining of its original 2005 composition from perfume creation director Francis Kurkdjian, who uses the iris plant from flower to root for a fresh, sultry aroma. "There's a closeness to it," Pattinson says. "I'm not really that into having a scent where as soon as you walk into a room, everybody's like, Oh, you're wearing a fragrance. There's something about this which combines with your natural scent as well. It's not massively obtrusive. It's more of an aura thing."

Pattinson himself gets atmospheric playing a regenerative astronaut in Mickey 17, which debuts later this year after a few failures to launch. "I like how much it normalizes space travel," says the actor, who since his last live-action film welcomed a child with partner Suki Waterhouse, "it reminds me of when all these news stories came basically saying that aliens exist on earth, after years and years and years. And everyone's forgotten. They're on TikTok again two seconds later. That's the attitude about space travel," Pattinson continues, "it's not like what you see in normal sci-fi movies, where there's a gravitas to it. With Mickey, it's just the same old shit. You've still just got an awful boss. There's no respite on the other side of the universe. It's worse."

Given the film's ambivalence about space, it's little surprise that Pattinson has no desire to planet-surf. "My lack of imagination," he begins, "even when you see someone on a space shuttle: Okay, so you go in the space shuttle, and then you just look out windows. How different would it be from watching the TV, watching a screen saver? Other than being able to tell people. I wouldn't mind doing a space walk, but being in the ship? I think I prefer to maybe get a dog."