Robert Pattinson has rarely seemed interested in taking the most obvious route into a character. Across a career increasingly defined by peculiar, unpredictable and sometimes deeply uncomfortable performances, the actor has demonstrated a willingness to disappear into characters without necessarily explaining them. For Primetime, though, Pattinson initially wasn’t planning on disappearing into anyone at all.
Directed by documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim in his narrative feature debut, Primetime takes inspiration from the cultural phenomenon surrounding To Catch a Predator, the Dateline NBC segments that transformed journalist Chris Hansen into one of the most recognisable television personalities of the mid-2000s. Rather than approaching Hansen’s story as a conventional biopic, the film turns that period of American television into something increasingly surreal: part media satire, part psychological thriller and part fever dream about what happens when journalism, performance and spectacle become impossible to separate.
Pattinson was originally involved with the project as a producer and resisted the idea of playing Hansen himself. Speaking with our Peter Gray about what eventually changed his mind, he asked the actor whether observing Hansen from the relative safety of producing the film revealed something that became more uncomfortable once he actually had to inhabit him.
“No, I think the initial draft, when I found it, almost required someone with this kind of American-dad energy – otherwise it wouldn’t have made sense,” Pattinson explained. “You’d want to cast someone playing against type for it to land the same way.”
What ultimately drew him closer to Hansen wasn’t necessarily a newfound psychological connection to the journalist, but the movie itself becoming progressively stranger.
“As we talked about it, we started drifting into this slightly metaphysical world, where everything is a little surreal and mystical, and I thought, that’s my kind of thing,” he continued. “I like things that are more esoteric and strange.”
That shift feels crucial to understanding both Primetime and Pattinson’s performance within it. Set in 2006, at the height of To Catch a Predator’s success, Oppenheim’s film finds Hansen being handed the kind of mainstream platform he had long pursued: a primetime slot for the program’s televised sting operations. But increased visibility also creates an appetite for escalation. What begins under the banner of investigative journalism gradually starts resembling something closer to theatre, complete with sets, performers, rehearsed beats and a charismatic host who understands exactly where the cameras are.
The irony is that Hansen is pursuing people he believes can be divided cleanly into monsters and innocents while existing inside a television machine that is becoming considerably harder to define in such uncomplicated terms.
For Pattinson, that ambiguity provided a more interesting route into the character than attempting to construct a definitive psychological explanation for Hansen’s behaviour.
“It moved further away from being a traditional biopic – it was never really that, even in the first draft – but the further we drifted into this strange ether the movie exists in now, the more I understood it,” Pattinson said.
That distinction is particularly important given how thoroughly Hansen has been absorbed into internet culture. To Catch a Predator, which began airing as recurring Dateline NBC segments in 2004, outgrew the boundaries of the program that created it. Hansen’s confrontations, cadence and “have a seat” persona became instantly recognisable, and eventually endlessly imitated, clipped and memed.
Primetime is therefore dealing not simply with Chris Hansen the journalist, but Chris Hansen the television character and, eventually, Chris Hansen the cultural artifact.
Pattinson’s performance embraces that instability. Rather than disappearing into a meticulously naturalistic impersonation, he plays with the theatrical qualities audiences already associate with Hansen, pushing his confidence and mannerisms until something stranger begins emerging underneath them. The performance can be funny, unnerving and deliberately outsized, sometimes within the same scene, while suggesting a man who has become inseparable from the authority he performs for an audience.
Perhaps most revealingly, Pattinson says he didn’t arrive there by intellectually dissecting Hansen.
“I also don’t approach things psychologically, trying to understand a character intellectually; I think about it purely in terms of performance,” he explained.
It’s an illuminating admission from an actor whose performances so often invite audiences to search for the psychology beneath them. Pattinson’s Hansen may project certainty, but the actor himself wasn’t necessarily constructing an elaborate internal thesis about why the man behaves as he does. Instead, the character revealed himself through the act of playing him – and through a screenplay that kept providing Pattinson with increasingly unusual opportunities.
“The more scenes we got, the more I thought, this has got something juicy in it,” Pattinson said. “And it just got juicier and juicier.”
That “juiciness” is evident in how Primetime allows Hansen’s public persona to gradually overwhelm the boundaries around it. Oppenheim has described the film as more fever dream than traditional biography, an approach that reflects the inherent artifice of To Catch a Predator itself. Actors portrayed teenagers, houses became controlled television environments and hidden cameras captured encounters with very real consequences. Reality was being manipulated in order to present itself as reality.
Hansen sits at the centre of that contradiction as both journalist and performer, interrogator and television personality, someone ostensibly pursuing justice while simultaneously needing that justice to make compelling television.
It makes Pattinson an inspired choice precisely because he doesn’t attempt to resolve those contradictions for the audience. His Hansen is charismatic enough to understand why viewers watched him, ridiculous enough to expose the theatricality of what he was doing, and increasingly unnerving as the distinction between the man and the television personality begins to disappear.
And perhaps that explains why Pattinson ultimately had to play him. The more Primetime abandoned the safety of a straightforward biographical drama, the more Hansen became the type of character Pattinson could recognise – not necessarily psychologically, but performatively.
Once Primetime entered that “strange ether,” Pattinson had found his way in.
Primetime is screening in North American theatres from September 25th, 2026, before opening in Australia on October 29th.
