Primetime Might Be Robert Pattinson’s First Real Shot at an Oscar

Since breaking out in the tween-friendly Twilight saga twenty years ago, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson have each transformed themselves into Hollywood’s most arthouse-friendly weirdos. Stewart sealed her reinvention with a Best Actress nomination for Spencer back in 2022, but due to the Academy’s longstanding bias against hunks, Pattinson has been forced to wait longer for his own induction into the Oscar clubhouse. After the performance we’ve just seen the 40-year-old actor give at the Venice Film Festival, though, that may be about to change. Playing To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen in Lance Oppenheim’s docudrama Primetime, Pattinson gives a performance of such repellent charisma that, come January, it may be the Academy’s acting branch who invites him to “take a seat.”

Critics on the Lido have been effusive in their praise. “I’ve admired Pattinson for years, but nothing quite prepared me for his turn as Hansen,” our own Bilge Ebiri wrote. “It’s a stunning demonstration of the actor’s range, and watching the film you can’t imagine any other performer of his generation pulling it off.” In Variety, Jessica Kiang spotlighted “Pattinson’s mimicry of the real Hansen’s physical mannerisms,” as well as his “uncanny” ability to capture “the self-consciously over-rehearsed cadences of Hansen’s speech.” Deadline’s Damon Wise wondered whether the actor “may finally be entering the Christian Bale period of his career.”

Shot in the lurid A24 house style, Primetime follows Hansen at what should be his moment of triumph. It’s 2006, and NBC has just moved To Catch a Predator to Wednesdays at 9 p.m., where it will face off against ABC’s Lost. The bigger spotlight necessitates bigger scores. Run-of-the-mill pedophiles will no longer cut it. Hansen becomes fixated on the idea of landing a “whale,” exposing an elusive figure who seems to occupy the highest reaches of government. Counterbalancing him is a young actor cast to play one of the show’s decoys (an excellent Skylar Gisondo), whose guilelessness only magnifies the film’s sense of Hansen as a man constructed entirely out of TV-friendly sheen. Pattinson doesn’t just nail the square-jawed glare, the stentorian delivery, he also invests his Hansen with a reptilian coldness. Other biopics seek to peel back the layers of a public persona; Primetime puts forth a version of Hansen where the surface is all there is.

As Oppenheim put it at the film’s Venice press conference, he’d long been fascinated by Hansen, and only became more so after his wife gifted him a Cameo from the host for his birthday. The idea of “a man who became a myth, a person who became a persona,” until he had become “the meme of himself,” seemed like a fascinating subject for the former documentarian. He was brought aboard by Pattinson, who as one of the film’s producers had been developing the script for years alongside screenwriter Ajon Singh. At first, the star did not intend to play the part himself. “It read older,” Pattinson said. “But now I feel older anyway.” (Hansen was in his late 40s during the events of the film.) Eventually, he got to the point where he couldn’t bear to hand Hansen off to another actor. “I was trying to mold the part to be the best part to play for somebody else, but I got more and more attached to it,” he said. 

Like his Odyssey co-star Anne Hathaway, Pattinson is coming to Oscar season on a heater. In spring, he starred opposite Zendaya in the discourse magnet The Drama, a surprise hit. In summer, he got meme-ified as a cowardly suitor in The Odyssey. In winter, he’ll take the baddie role of Scytale, a Tleilaxu Face Dancer in Dune: Part Three. Of his quartet of 2026 releases, Primetime feels like the most natural place for his awards campaign to coalesce. For one, it’s the only film in that bunch that belongs completely to him. (Though he’s arguably the POV character of The Drama, Pattinson is second-billed there.) If all goes well, voters could find themselves checking a box for Primetime as a way to reward Pattinson’s banner year as a whole.

So too does Primetime, like Spencer, represent a marriage between the tastes of the old Academy and the new. It’s a biopic of an instantly recognizable figure that affords its star an Oscar-friendly transformation — but it’s also an off-kilter one, coming from a buzzy studio that knows how to turn an awards vehicle into a viral event. Pattinson’s Hansen may be a monocultural titan, but he remains an off-putting figure from start to finish, the latest in the actor’s long line of weird little freaks in films such as Good Time, The Lighthouse, and Mickey 17.

Primetime may also be arriving at the right moment in Pattinson’s career. He’s of roughly similar age as the reigning Best Actor winner, Michael B. Jordan — an A-Lister in his prime, but old enough for awards voters to feel like he has paid his dues. Equally, Pattinson’s ability to jump seamlessly between offbeat indies and hundred-million-dollar tentpoles is a skill the modern Academy tends to value. Voters will still never nominate an actor for a superhero movie, but as recent nods for Andrew Garfield and Sebastian Stan have proven, they have no qualms about nominating an actor for the smaller movie they do in between superhero movies.

Some caution is warranted. It’s fair to ask whether this version of Hansen might be too repulsive for Oscar voters. Plenty of unlikable characters have made their way into the Best Actor lineup recently, from Donald Trump to Marty Supreme. But voters are typically looking for someone to root for, a fact that derailed one notable analogue to Pattinson’s performance: Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler. The success of last year’s documentary Predators may also present complications. The doc covered similar ground, in many critics’ opinion offering greater sociological complexity than Primetime, which is more of a character study.

Unlike Best Actress, where spots feel ripe for the taking, this year’s Best Actor race is already pretty full — and, with Venice going gaga for John Malkovich’s turn in Wild Horse Nine one day prior, it’s only getting fuller. Still, there’s a path to a nomination here, and it’s similar to the one A24 blazed for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You star Rose Byrne last season: Pick up momentum from critics groups, who seem unlikely to go for rivals like The Odyssey’s Matt Damon or Digger’s Tom Cruise, to the point where you become impossible for the Academy to deny. (As one member of the New York Film Critics Circle reminded me, Pattinson could also benefit from these groups’ penchant for awarding actors who are repping multiple films in the same year.)

Still, the Oscar race will be far more exciting, and far more weird, if Pattinson’s in it. And in the event that Chris Hansen is indeed the role that finally lands the actor a nomination, in a very literal sense, the Academy will also be nominating him for The Odyssey. Pattinson shot both projects around the same time, and in the press conference, he revealed his fears that the performances may have blended into each other: “I could hear a little Chris Hansen in The Odyssey when I watched it.”