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In The Rover’s bleak universe, there is virtually no backstory — illustrative of a world in which nothing really matters — and we know little about Robert Pattinson’s Rey other than that he and his older brother (Scoot McNairy) are in a small band of thugs who were violently thwarted during a criminal act we don’t see. An injured Rey has been abandoned for expedience’s sake, which is how he becomes a hostage to Eric (Guy Pearce), whose car has been stolen by Rey’s former friends. (Eric really wants that car back, for a reason that is revealed only in the movie’s final moments.) As Rey, Pattinson plays a “half-wit,” as Eric calls him, a far cry from Twilight’s Edward Cullen, the emo vampire who served as a tweenage fantasy.

The Rover is David Michôd’s second feature as a director, following up on 2010’s lauded, provocative Animal Kingdom. And though it takes place in Australia, where Michôd is from, Rey and his brother inexplicably have American Southern accents. It’s good for Pattinson to sound nothing like Edward, the character that made him famous. Rey starts out fearful — in one scene he folds himself into a fetal position. But he also changes as the movie goes on (to describe would be to spoil). In Variety, Scott Foundas called it a “career-redefining performance” for Pattinson.

In an interview with BuzzFeed this week in Beverly Hills, Pattinson discussed The Rover (which premiered at Cannes last month and comes out in New York and Los Angeles this weekend, and will be released nationally next Friday), and his post-Twilight career. And he has been working a lot: In addition to David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, which also premiered at Cannes, he will soon appear in Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert, Anton Corbijn’s Life, and Olivier Assayas’ Idol’s Eye with Robert De Niro, which has not yet begun filming. As someone who tripped into huge stardom after he was cast in Twilight, and then fell into a viper’s nest of paparazzi as one-half of a tabloid couple while he dated his co-star Kristen Stewart, Pattinson, now 28, described life after Edward as a “process.”

He has now lived a good portion of his life hunted, both by paps and fans, but in person, he is neither brooding nor tortured. Actually, he was quick to laugh. And he seems to have figured out how to live a sane life, if not a normal one.

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