“Obviously, I hope he likes the movie,” Pattinson said of his human source material at a press conference for the film (per Variety). “There’s something electrifying about him. I would hope the amount of inspiration his character has given a lot of people for years is some kind of compliment.”
Pattinson, for his part, actually has a lot of nice things to say about Hansen, noting that his delivery and presentation helped make the original To Catch A Predator compelling in a way it wouldn’t have been without its host’s hyper-serious performance. “There’s something magnetic about his presence,” Pattinson said. “I watched the show when I was younger and didn’t think about it. There’s a strange alchemy—something he’s doing is the reason people are still talking about that show 20 years later. It’s not to do solely with the subject matter. It was something about the show that was groundbreaking, but then he’s someone centering it. There’s something, even after watching literally thousands of hours of it, you can’t put your finger on it.”
That’s certainly a bit nicer than comments made by Oppenheim, who noted that he was inspired to make Primetime—which shows Hansen get increasingly monomaniacal as journalism and justice begin intermixing with the perils and lures of international fame—after he bought a Cameo from Hansen for his wife that was jammed with pitches for the host’s other projects. (Which makes it especially funny that said host has now launched his own unofficial promotional campaign attached to the movie he doesn’t actually sound that jazzed about, running ads for his TruBlu platform—where he still regularly runs a Predator-style show called Takedown—in front of screenings of the film.)
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