Can Somebody Get These BEGGARS Out Of Here?

I don’t know what it is about Christopher Nolan, but his movies have always made good memes—probably because they are the only movies that you can be sure everyone you know has seen. It’s one of the qualities that make me believe that his movies will stand the test of time, even if I don’t love all of his work. He has created images that stand in for feelings and expressions and have become a part of language, which is certainly an achievement. The Odyssey is no different, thanks to the invaluable talents of Robert Pattinson.

People have said variations on the idea that Robert Pattinson has been “making up for” starring as Edward Cullen in Twilight, but I don’t think he has much to make up for. Pattinson is actually great in Twilight for the same reasons he’s a great actor in general: He takes Edward totally seriously, especially his selfishness and emotional unavailability, creating a character who is both authentically charming and loathsome. One of the first movies he made after the completion of the Twilight series, Cosmopolis, puts his talents for creating a slimy creep on full display. 

Cosmopolis is an adaptation of a Don Delillo novel of the same name, directed by David Cronenberg, and is about a very rich man, Eric Packer, who is trying to make it across town for a haircut, only to be stuck in traffic because the president is in town. It’s difficult to make Packer an interesting character to watch because his wealth has completely scooped him out inside—he is only really concerned with buying things and thinking about things he can buy. But with Pattinson’s skill, he makes Packer’s utterly pointless journey fascinating because he is so horrible.

Pattinson has played a string of Horrible Guys in the decade since Cosmopolis—Thomas Howard in The Lighthouse, Connie Nikas in Good Time, and he went absolutely freak mode in a small part in the Timothee Chalamet movie The King as The Dauphin, doing some vocal work that simply must be seen to be believed.

The Odyssey offers Pattinson a chance to play another weird asshole—Antinous, one of Penelope’s many suitors in Ithaca. Pattinson, always a troll in interviews, has described his role as like “playing Jacob in Twilight.”

Pattinson clearly loves being Antinous, a character who is truly only concerned with his own wants and needs above everyone else’s. Antinous clearly believes that he alone deserves to be king of Ithaca, and is generous with his disrespect. He said that he thinks Antinous would wear cheetah fur underpants as a way to portray the sensuousness of the character.

“This sounds so ridiculous when you say it out loud,” the actor told Today. “This is my job! It’s my job to have these thoughts.”

It’s Pattinson’s deep love of creating such a horrible man that leads to the very best line reading in The Odyssey. When Odysseus returns home, disguised as a beggar, Antinous cannot hide his contempt. At one point, he says to his fellow suitors, “Can somebody get these beggars out of here?”

I did not know it was possible to say the word “beggars” in such a way that it sounds like a racial slur, but somehow, vein popping out of his neck, Robert Pattinson manages this. My husband and I have been walking around our apartment, telling each other “can somebody get these beggars out of here?” to each other since we saw the movie last weekend, but no matter how hard I try I can’t get the inflection quite right. This line read has clearly made an impression on other people who’ve seen The Odyssey too; a blurry screen recording of the moment has become a very popular meme.

Just as Nolan is clearly an all-timer director, someone whose work has been canonized and will inevitably be studied and discussed for decades, I think that Pattinson is an all-timer actor. Part of that is just because he clearly loves it—he loves making an audience hate him, he loves doing weird little voices, and he loves finding all the strange contours of his characters to make them truly lived in. Even when I return to Twilight, which I do every hoa hoa season, I see these qualities in him as an actor. You can see that he kind of hates playing Edward, and he pours that hate into the character, who comes off as whiny and insecure, perpetually a nerd who doesn’t actually want to have sex with his girlfriend on prom night. I love him. And I cannot wait to see what weird shit he gets up to in Dune 3.