Robert Pattinson is opening up about the difficulty of capturing Chris Hansen’s distinctive delivery for “Primetime,” A24’s upcoming drama about the journalist behind “To Catch a Predator.”
Pattinson told GQ that nailing Hansen’s cadence pushed him further than expected. “It’s just such a unique voice. It was actually incredibly difficult,” he said, describing how he listened obsessively to Hansen’s podcast, in which the former Dateline host revisits his old cases. “I was just walking around constantly trying to imitate his voice, but it’s pretty dark material. I’m wandering around the streets saying what he’s talking about, and people are incredibly confused with what’s going on.” The role marks another entry in Pattinson’s pattern of transforming his voice for a part, following a similarly distinct approach in last year’s “Mickey 17.”
The film, directed by documentarian Lance Oppenheim in his fiction feature debut, dramatizes Hansen’s 2006 run producing “To Catch a Predator” for NBC, drawing partly from Luke Dittrich’s Esquire piece about a sting operation that ended with an assistant district attorney’s suicide after a police raid on his home. Pattinson said “Primetime” is the first project he has shaped from its earliest stages, recalling an eight-hour Christmas Day video call with Oppenheim and writer Ajon Singh two years ago as they worked to lock the script before production began that January.
Hansen himself has become an increasingly vocal critic of the film, which premieres September 25. He says A24 turned him away from an early screening after he declined to sign paperwork he described as unusually restrictive, claiming it would have required him to give up rights to his name and image along with any legal claims tied to the movie. A source close to the studio disputed that characterization to multiple outlets, describing the document as a standard nondisclosure agreement meant to guard against spoilers rather than a rights transfer.
Hansen has since said he’s weighing legal action, telling SiriusXM’s “The Dan Abrams Show” that an entertainment lawyer told him he likely has “a decent case,” though he’s wary of generating publicity for the film in the process. He has also purchased advertising time for his true-crime streaming service, TruBlu, to run ahead of “Primetime” screenings during its first month in theaters. Describing the trailer’s portrayal of him, Hansen called Pattinson “a gifted actor” while objecting that the character comes across as “darkened up and almost vampirish” and that scenes depicted in the marketing never happened as shown.
