Do you want to hear a funny thing about Robert Pattinson? Robert Pattinson is convinced he doesn’t know how to act. Willem Dafoe can act, Pattinson thinks. Willem Dafoe can act the socks off anyone in the business. And Joaquin Phoenix. Joaquin Phoenix could tie his shoelaces on film and be nominated for an award. And Bruce Willis – Bruce Willis! – now there’s a leading man. But Robert Pattinson? Nope. “I only know how to play scenes, like, three ways,” he says. Three! That’s all. Despite more than a decade in the industry. “I’m nervous on, like, every single movie.”

Pattinson, who is 33, is sitting in a booth in a low-lit restaurant in Notting Hill, west London, dunking table bread into a pot of something. It’s the early evening, dark and cold outside. He has arrived from rehearsals for The Batman, which started not long ago and which are taking place, to his delight, in the studio in which he filmed Harry Potter in the mid-aughts. The Batman is the first time he’s worked in a studio in “like, forever,” and his first mainstream leading role since he retired his best-known character, Twilight’s Edward Cullen, sexy vampire. That was in 2012.

Maybe he’s tired now. Or maybe he’s had a bad day. Maybe he’s arriving at the studio every morning and not quite getting Batman’s vibe. Maybe he’ll never get Batman’s vibe, and people will finally agree he really can’t act, and his career will come screeching to its inevitable end, and the whole world will fold in on itself.

Which are the kind of thoughts Robert Pattinson has.

“I’m a catastrophist,” he says, laughing. Pattinson laughs a lot and goes for it: closes his eyes, throws back his head, reveals the square jaw and the fine stubble and the underside of the slightly skew-whiff nose, and lets out a loud, unfiltered giggle. “I’m always thinking that the worst-case scenario is actually going to happen. So when it does happen, I’m like: ‘Gah! OK! I’m prepared!’”

Seeing the light: with Willem Dafoe in Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse. Photograph: Eric Chakeen/AP

Other actors suffer from bouts of false modesty. But Pattinson is wholeheartedly committed to the concept of his ordinariness. He is not “totemic,” he says, like other traditional leading men. And he tends not to work hard in the lead-up to filming, because what if he somehow conjures some very good acting before an actual take, and can’t reproduce whatever spontaneous fluke that created it when the cameras roll? “If I show it in rehearsals,” he says, “then it’s doomed to failure immediately.”

It’s strange to hear, all this worry and self-doubt, because over the past six or seven years Pattinson has been slowly, forcefully, making fine films with very good directors. He has worked with David Cronenberg on Cosmopolis and Claire Denis on High Life, Werner Herzog on Queen of the Desert and the Safdie Brothers on Good Time. In The King, David Michôd’s kind of retelling of Shakespeare’s Henriad, which came out on Netflix earlier this year, Pattinson plays a French prince so brilliantly camp it was reported that his co-stars burst into laughter the first time they heard his accent. This kind of thing thrills Pattinson, because at least he got a reaction. “If I’m doing a scene and I see that the other actor is expecting me to do it the way I’m doing it, if I can just see that it hasn’t surprised them, I immediately feel stupid,” he says. Timothée Chalamet plays The King’s titular monarch, but it’s Pattinson scenes you remember: long blond hair; accent as thick as a block of beurre.

Next month, Pattinson will star in The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers’s two-hander about lighthouse keepers descending into madness on a remote and craggy island. He appears alongside Willem Dafoe, the actual actor, which was nerve-wracking, of course. “He’s got a tonne of energy,” Pattinson says, “and it’s intimidating.” Before scenes, Pattinson would punch himself in the face, or twirl around to create dizziness, or drink mud from puddles, or force himself to gag. He explains the process as necessary – a wild attempt to maximise creativity – because, you remember, he’s just so bad at acting. “Because I don’t really know how to act, I kind of wanted to somehow make it real, and one of the ways I’ve always thought makes that a little bit easier is if you shake up your physical state just before action. You end up walking into a scene having a different” – pause – “feeling.”

‘In a lot of ways I haven’t developed past 15. I still like hip-hop, Van Morrison and Jeff Buckley’: Robert Pattinson wearing Dior Homme. Photograph: Danielle Levitt/The Observer

Occasionally, Pattinson would gag so hard he’d throw up. “And I forgot I had a mic on the whole time, so the producers and the director, before every single take of the movie, would get…” He sits back in the booth and makes a loud retching sound. “It kind of puts everyone else off.” What did his co-star think? “I don’t know, I was too engrossed in my gagging.”

In The Lighthouse, Pattinson’s character grows slowly wilder and more febrile. And so, while filming, Pattinson thought he probably should, too. “I like doing whatever I can to not know what’s going on. To be completely overwhelmed and disorientated. To feel like it’s actually happening.” Did it work? It did! To anyone watching, if not the actor himself, Pattinson emerges as Dafoe’s on-screen equal. (Dafoe, noting Pattinson’s lack of confidence, said recently: “How do I deal with this charming self-deprecation?”) Word is The Lighthouse role might earn Pattinson an Academy Award nomination. Maybe a shot at a Bafta. Which is as good a nod as any to the fact that Robert Pattinson has quietly become one of Britain’s best actors.

“I’m kind of amazed by how it’s been received,” he says. He’s sipping a beer now, dunking the bread. “I love the movie. I think it’s soooo cool. But I never would have thought…” He never thought people would actually see it – a small independent film he shot in 2018 – let alone absolutely love it, which has been the near-universal response. “It’s done better than almost anything I’ve done in, like, ages, and it’s the most random movie. Knowing there’s a hunger for stuff that’s very, very strange – that’s cool! That’s the stuff I like making!”

The general consensus is Pattinson turned to independent films to escape the interminable celebrity glare. Twilight birthed him into mega-stardom, and mega-stardom turned out to be a state into which he’d have preferred never to have been born, thank you very much. Fans hoped he might bask in the limelight, take on a few major roles, emerge as the leading man he was destined to become. But Pattinson didn’t feel like playing along. He’d tasted the mainstream and decided on the cusp. So we made up that Robert Pattinson had actively chosen the quiet life. That he’d turned against Hollywood. That he couldn’t handle the heat. That he was trying to escape.

At one point, during the vampire years, escape required actual physical strategies. For example, sometimes he’d walk into a restaurant with friends, ask that they swap clothes halfway through a meal, and make a getaway while photographers waited for the handsome actor to exit the venue in the same outfit in which he entered. (Take that, Paps!) But appearing in art house cinema was a different escape strategy altogether – an opportunity to continue working while simultaneously blending into the background. He starred in films very few people paid to see on the big screen, the world thought, because a part of him longed to disappear. He didn’t need the money any more; presumably Twilight had made him rich many times over. So why not?

Centre stage: at the Rome Film Festival meeting fans of Twilight. Photograph: Franco Origlia/Getty Images

But “No!” Pattinson says. He shakes his head. No. No. No. No. No. This hasn’t been about escape. And he hasn’t been trying to defy our expectations. Not strategically, anyway. He just hasn’t been offered the roles. “Nothing ever came up for a big movie!” He did audition for Scorsese, and once for the Coen brothers, “but the whole world auditioned for those parts,” he says, and who was he to walk up to Scorsese and demand work? “I guess there was a part of me that was a little trepidatious about doing, like, a long-running series” – a “saga”. But really there was no conscious decision to avoid one, either. All he wanted was to work with the directors he admired, make the films he wanted to make. “There wasn’t, like, a long-term plan.”

And all of this talk of him being terrified of fame… It was never too much. For a while, Pattinson was one of the best-known people on the planet – “R-Patz”, beautiful Edward, boyfriend and then not-boyfriend to Kristen Stewart – but that’s how it goes. He actually thought it was cool! “I think the stuff about fame is the most boring,” he says. “There’s nothing to say. Literally think about what you imagine fame to be for one second. It’s like that. People recognise your face. That’s it.” In the restaurant, nobody pays him much attention. Nobody looks over. Nobody points and giggles. Everything’s different now, he says, but it wouldn’t really bother him if it wasn’t. “When I was younger, when I was a little bit more insecure, I kept thinking people were disappointed when they met me.” And now? “Now I don’t give a shit.”

For a long time, Pattinson has been drawn to complex, often oddball characters. The camp French prince. The New York conman on the run. The criminal astronaut with a baby. He plays men called the Dauphin (The King), or Connie Nikas (Good Time), or Ephraim Winslow (The Lighthouse). He rarely plays characters called Ben or Ryan or Joe. Edward is about as boring as it gets, and even then the character is a telepathic immortal.

Magic touch: with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire co-stars. Photograph: Dave Hogan/Getty Images

“I’m not entirely sure how to play, like, a normal person,” he says. “I don’t think I’m great at subtle.” He enjoys playing characters that are the opposite of his real self, which, he says, is totally normal and straightforward and low key. “I like characters who, when a situation is placed upon them, their decision-making process is incomprehensible.” He laughs. “I find it fascinating when people make bad decisions. The humour and the befuddlement.”

It is the versions of Pattinson that are somehow befuddled that are the most fun to watch. The befuddlement comes from within. “I guess I see the world a lot of the time and don’t know what’s going on,” he says. “Like, I’m kind of disassociated. No, that sounds negative. More discombobulated.” He laughs again. It’s been like this forever. “I can’t remember what book it’s from, but this bit always really stuck with me, something I thought I could use as a good description of myself: there’s, like, a dog in an elevator, and every time the doors open there’s this whole new world, and it just can’t figure out what’s going on. That’s, like, every day for me.”

Pattinson grew up in Barnes, south London. It was leafy and calm. “A very, very nice childhood,” he says. In his teens he went through a skateboarding phase, but he could never act the part. Then he went through a music phase. He never wanted to be an actor, but he very much wanted to be a musician. There was a time, before he was cast in Harry Potter and when he was still very young, when he played at an open mic night in London’s Soho every Monday, presumably hoping for a break.

“In a lot of ways I haven’t developed past 15,” he says. “This is still my style of clothing” – he points to the skateboard T-shirt he’s wearing – “and this is still my music taste. Like, hip-hop between 1997 and 2002. And Van Morrison. And Jeff Buckley. All the people I found at 14.” He was a “space cadet” as a kid, he says. And still now. “But then I have periods of extreme ambition, of being very, very driven.” His great gift, he explains, is not acting, but being excellent at choosing the right people to work with – people who can make him better.

‘Before filming, I do whatever I can to not know what is going on’: Robert Pattison wears suit by Jacquemus and shoes by John Lobb. Photograph: Danielle Levitt/The Observer

“I think I’ve got good taste in movies,” he says. “I can see, from a very short meeting, whether a director is going to make something good.” Before working with the Safdie brothers on Good Time, he saw a single still image from one of their films, became convinced they should collaborate, and was overjoyed when they agreed. And when he took the call to say he’d got the job with High Life director Claire Denis, a director he’d long admired, he could “barely even stand up”. “I sat down on a kerb, near here.” He nods at the window. “And I was so high from it! There’s nothing better for actors than getting the jobs you want. Nothing better. Especially when they’re difficult to get.” He kind of slaps the table. “There’s nothing that feels better than achievement!”

The Batman is achievement, he says. Pattinson said yes to the part because “I felt a connection to it, I don’t know why,” but also because, “I just really wanted it.” The role has a “power”, which is why “everyone is attracted to it. It’s an unidentifiable thing.” But he’s already sick of the questions. He just wants to get on with making the film. “I’m already remembering what it’s like to talk about a movie where there’s an expectation. Whenever you say anything, people are like, ‘Argh! You idiot!’ Like, dude, I haven’t even started yet!”

I point out it’s a lot to live up to. “But there is no harsher critic of myself than myself, so I don’t need to worry about anyone else.” And what will he do if all of his worst case scenarios play out? If he never gets Batman’s vibe? He thinks for a minute, then tosses back the head and gives the big giggle. “Porn,” he says. “But art house porn.”

The Lighthouse is in cinemas from 31 January

Producer Stephanie Porto; set design Cooper Vasquez; stylist Rebecca Grice at Forward Artists; grooming Kristan Serafino at Tracey Mattingly; shot at Milk Studios