Chris Hansen has finally watched Primetime, gives Robert Pattinson's performance a "D"

To be clear, Hansen pretty clearly doesn’t like the movie, which he said was “98 percent pure fiction.” (He especially highlighted a bit where former NBC News executive Jeff Zucker played himself for Oppenheim’s camera, having a conversation with Robert Pattinson’s faux-Hansen that the real guy says never happened.) Talking to Fox News host Jesse Waters, though, it’s kind of wild how practiced Hansen’s reaction feels, as he busts out lines we’ve heard from him multiple times during this sort of anti-press tour he’s been on. (Including an assertion that he’s “too busy being the real Chris Hansen” to worry about a fake one, and, referencing a message he got from Oppenheim at one point that the movie was intended as a “love letter” with “if that’s a love letter, I’d hate to get a poison pen letter from this director.”)

Asserting that he’s actively trying to avoid turning the movie into “the movie that Chris Hansen doesn’t want you to see”—while also unashamedly saying “I’ll use it to my benefit for all the great projects that we have in the works”—Hansen makes it sound like he’s got almost no actual reaction to the film at all. (At one point he remarks that it’s “So far from reality that it wouldn’t even bother me,” and his comments on the filmmaking start and stop at lines like “interesting photography,” and references to Oppenheim using a lot of green in his depiction of a mental breakdown.) The only time he sounds genuinely emotional during the whole half-hour reaction is when he gets into the film’s depiction of him as a father: “What bothered me most was that it portrayed me as an aloof, detached father from my sons,” he notes, adding that he felt the addition of those scenes was “meanspirited, untrue, and unworthy of the viewers’ time.”

As for Pattinson (who’s “been very gracious in his comments about me,” Hansen archly notes), the reviews were more definitive. Pressed by Watters, Hansen broke with the general critical consensus, giving the actor a “D” grade for his portrayal. Sorry, Robert! Better luck next “making a movie about a guy who’s still alive without his permission but with his very loud public commentary!”