#if you can read about what he did to fka twigs and still support him seek help

[yourarmynoona]

Red Light District || Chapter 2

(Moodboard by Me)

Description:  [Sex Worker!AU] [DomTae!AU] You were young, naive, and oh-so desperate to keep your head afloat in the big city. Working in the Red Light District was easy. Until he came along.

Rating: M

Pairings: Taehyung x Reader; Jungkook x Reader; Jimin x Jungkook x Reader; Taehyung x Jimin x Reader

Themes: S-M-U-T. Drugs, Alcohol, Sex, and NAUGHTY THINGS!!!

7.5k+ Words

Notes: Chapter inspired by “Papi Pacify” by FKA Twigs (Seriously. Watch the Video) and “High for This” by the Weeknd. This chapter is dedicated to @shadowstark for my first ever fic review and @bangtanprincesss as a thank you for my custom imagine!

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5

A bouncer escorted you to the famous V, who was seated like he was before, his arms outstretched across the wood portion of the couch and one leg elegantly crossed at the ankle across his knee. He was oblivious to your approach, his eyes scanning the room as his head bobbed lightly in sync with the bass reverberating throughout the club. He was sitting in one of the squared-off VIP areas that had a large central couch with two-smaller couches and a table decorated with a variety of glasses and expensive bottles of liquor. 

He was between what appeared to be two of his friends and to your surprise, Jin, one of your notorious coworkers who despite being born into money, decided to become a host and entertainer. As you approached, the bouncer, a man of about 6-foot-something and 200-something pounds in black stepped back, his hands clasped at his front. V delicately turned as he saw you approach, a smirk playing on his lips as he brought a thumb to brush against them and lolled his head to one side, taking in your figure.

“V I presume? I’m Foxx. A pleasure to make your acquaintance” you stated somewhat formally as you swung yourself down into the space next to him. You had kept your dance heels on, making it somewhat difficult to maneuver to the couch, leaving you to plop down slightly. You could feel the eyes of the other men near him pay you a small glance before resuming their conversations.

“Oh the pleasure is all mine. You can call me Taehyung, by the way. No need for stage names here.”

Taehyung was scanning over your cross-legged form to his side and you were sure his words applied to not just himself. You licked your lips lightly before smiling back and replying, “I suppose, but where’s the fun in that? It ruins the mystery.” He laughed, a boxy smile revealed his wonderfully perfect teeth that were so white you would most likely go blind in broad daylight. Your initial impression of him was that he was cocky but you were starting to see that perhaps he was simply overly playful. You decided to test the waters and see how ready he was to take you back to one of the rooms and have his way with you. Though you were keeping up a professional appearance, you could feel the wetness between your thighs spreading and the dull ache to be filled growing.

Slowly you leaned into him, your thighs touching his and one of your hands coming to rest itself on the upper portion of his arm as you cocked your head playfully. “So, Taehyung, I heard you wanted to meet me but I’m wondering if it was to talk or something else.” You worked your hand slowly up and down his bicep, the smooth satin of his shirt cool to your heated touch. Taehyung bit his lip and smirked.

“I mean we could, but why waste time talking when we could get to the point. You’re fucking gorgeous and I would love to spend tonight with you. In private” he emphasized his last sentence, running his long, elegant fingers down the side of your face as your eyes met his. There was something inexplicably alluring about his gaze. It captivated you and made the temperature of your body skyrocket all the while making you feel as if you had lost control of your own will.

“So what do you say, Foxx? Do you think I could get a night with you?”

“I think that can be arranged.”

Your magenta lips turned up into a slight smirk. Carefully you got up from your spot next to him and reached for his hand, motioning with your eyes to follow you. He licked his lips lustfully before taking your outstretched hand and following your form towards the long hallways guarded by one of the many bouncers. Taehyung briefly turned around and winked at his buddies in the VIP who began to hoot and holler, clapping their hands and laughing at their friend. You rolled your eyes. Boys will always be boys.

After a brief walk to the hall guarded by one of the bouncers simply nicknamed “Dung-geun”, you ushered Taehyung to small lobby area that was adorned with rich wooded floors, dark crimson walls, and mahogany furniture with plush pillows all illuminated by a central chandelier and small wall sconces that made the room feel like a palace. There were other men and women there, sitting on a large round loveseat or touching one another as they talked. It was quieter but the reverberation of the music emanating from the club could still be both heard and felt to some degree.  Turning to Taehyung suddenly you let him bump you gently before he wrapped his arms around you, gently swaying your body against his.

“So what can I expect tonight?”

“Hmm…well it depends, what do you want handsome?” you purred, your gaze lowering from his eyes to his soft lips.

Taehyung laughed softly before pulling you closer, his head tilted replying lowly “Everything”.

A shock ran from your chest to deep between your legs and you were suddenly aware of the way his fingertips were pressing deep into your hips and how close he was to your face. His presence was commanding and it made you want to give yourself over in every way. You wanted him so badly but there were sadly formalities to be had.

Pushing yourself off Taehyungs chest, you grabbed his hand and approached a large mahogany desk where an older woman sat smoking a long pipe, her round glasses sliding down the bridge of her nose, one hand stroking at her peppered gray locks.

“Mrs. Kim, I need a room. Can I get…” you trailed off, glancing over to Taehyung, “any of those rooms?”

Mrs. Kim straightened herself upright, eyeing you up and down before adjusting her glasses to examine Taehyung.

“Luckily Red isn’t taken. I’ll need you to fill this waver out young man and please leave your ID and credit card.”

Taehyung thanked Mrs. Kim and furiously filled out the paperwork as you went around the desk to write your name in the log and what room you were in. Though it was the modern era, the owner and Mrs. Kim preferred to do things by hand so as to keep client information confidential and secure. In addition, the paperwork for Euphoria also helped entertainers keep track of their clients likes, dislikes, and how much they regularly paid for. Once Taehyung finished the multiple signatures, he passed his entire wallet off to Mrs. Kim who sat eyeing him with little regard behind the mahogany desk.

“I assume you read the rules young man. You are responsible for all services rendered by Foxx and liable for any…damages that may be had. You are to abide by the rules of this establishment and all acts performed behind closed doors are to be consensual. Understood?”

Taehyung nodded.

Mrs. Kim cleared her throat and looked through the paperwork Taehyung had signed diligently, giving you a cautious glance before looking back down and opening a file to put his information in.

“You have paid for the remainder of the night and have selected full-services. Payment will be made upon leaving for the evening. A down-payment of $580 will be paid upfront. Any questions?”

Taehyung again nodded before coming up behind you to wrap his arms around you and nip at your ear before whispering “You’re all mine tonight Kitten.”

Guiding Taehyung down the hall was a heated mess of moans and needy kisses. He had thrown you into the wall and kissed you furiously, one hand to support himself and the other bringing one of your legs to wrap around him as you tangled your fingers in his hair. His kisses were hot and desperate, his tongue sliding against yours as he ground his hips into your barely clothed core. Every rut of his hardened member between your thighs was sending shocks of pleasure coursing through your veins and you had almost come from that alone.

It had take a fight to get Taehyung into the Red Room but once you had closed the door behind you, something in him changed. His eyes turned dark and his tongue creeped out to lick his lips as his hands glided up the curves along your body before he grasped a hand to your throat and another to the wall behind you. You couldn’t hide how turned on he was making you and you let forth a small moan as your eyes fluttered shut. His touch was making you dizzy and intoxicated and you felt yourself losing control of your sanity.

“Tonight you’re all mine kitten. You will do as I say and obey me. Understood?”

You nodded shyly, your mind a muddled mess as his thumb came to your lips and forced it’s way inside your mouth. He worked his thumb slowly in and out of your mouth, coaxing you to suck at it. And suck you did. You lapped at his thumb, sucking and swirling your tongue around it, making sure he knew you would be worth every penny he was spending on your attentions. You sucked and sucked, imagining what it would be like to have his cock sliding against your tongue and through tightened lips.

Withdrawing his thumb, he hissed through his teeth before commanding you to the center of the room and to kneel at the large illuminated red “X” in the center of the room facing him.

The room was spacious and illuminated in an eerie yet erotic glow of red. There was a St. Andrew’s Cross directly at the center and perpendicular to a large bed with a deep-red duvet and covered in numerous cream and red pillows. The walls were red and black, stripped with a black lacquered finish  across the bed wall that was hidden behind a large rectangular mirror. The amber lit chandeliers beside each side of the bed were dimly lit so as to allow the deep red of the recess lighting to penetrate the entirety of the room and cast a red glow across any bodies that would come to writhe in passions beneath it.

You knelt down, the cross behind you and saw to your left a wall with an assortment of paddles, whips, rope, and chains. You had known about the Red Room from Jimin but had never actually taken anyone into it. You started to imagine what dark fantasies Taehyung was going to use you for, a pool of wetness gathering between your thighs.

“Did I say you could look?” Taehyung barked, the echo of his leather dress shoes clicking across the black marbled floor.

You cast your eyes suddenly downwards. A red, hot desire was pooling deep within your body.

“No sir.”

Your voice was small and though a part of you was intimidated by the very man walking towards you, it excited you all the same.

“Speak up, Kitten. Did I say you could look?”

You raised your voice slightly.

“No sir.”

You could hear Taehyung’s chuckle and knew he was smirking at you.

That red, hot desire was now bubbling over and spilling fast into your limbs.

As he stopped in front of you, you felt his cool fingertips grasp at your chin and gently force your gaze upwards to him, your neck painfully craning. As you stared at him, you could feel that burn in your chest spreading further across your body. His thumb was caressing your chin delicately as he knelt down to your level, one arm resting across a knee. Taehyung turned your head gently from side to side, taking in your features before running his free hand down your throat, his hot breath billowing gently across the your cheek.

“Kitten, you really are beautiful” his voice tapered off to a hush.

He suddenly got up and began to unbutton his satin plum-colored shirt, his gaze never leaving yours. Desire was surging through your body and there was an ethereal vibration that was nearly palpable in the air, making your limbs heavy and your body weak with lust. Removing his shirt and throwing it haphazardly onto the floor, you finally saw what a fine body was hidden by the loose vestment. His shoulders were rounded and lean and led into a finely muscled chest and core, the striations of his musculature even more prominent as he let his hands wander to the seam of his dress slacks.

Unbuckling and rapidly removing the belt from his pants, he strode over, standing directly above you before wrapping the belt around your neck and giving it a slight tug, the loose chain bracelets on his wrist lightly clinking his watch.

“How is that kitten?”

“It feels good, Sir.”

“I want you to tell me what you like, what you don’t like, and if you want me to stop. Safe word is ‘lace’ Can you do that, Kitten?”

You nodded and he yanked the belt slightly around your throat, pulling you slightly forwards, your throat slightly constricting.

“Use your words.” He commanded.

“Yes, I will.” You purred delicately.

“Good.”

He commanded you upwards with a taut pull of the belt around your neck. Standing tall in your outrageously taller heels, Taehyung let loose his grip on the belt and walked around you. You didn’t dare move as you felt his hands caress down your shoulders and to the zipper on the back of your dress.  Agonizingly slow he began to unzip your dress, the sound of the metal unfurling was making your heart flutter.

Your breath hitched.

As your dress fell to the floor almost soundlessly save for the delicate clink of the zipper against the tile, you felt his body distance from yours as you stood in nothing but your black thong from your stage routine and your sky-high patent platform heels. You felt his chest press firmly against your back and his arms snake around to your front, one hand going towards your lips and the other between your legs.

“Oh fuck…you’re already so wet. Do I turn you on that much?” he hummed, his fingertips rubbing languid circles over your still clothed clit.  You could only hum in response as he worked his fingers over your clit and slid his other fingers into your mouth against your tongue. He ground his erection hard into your ass as he teased you, your hands reaching behind to steady yourself while he slid his fingers deep into the recesses of your mouth. Your eyes fluttered closed as you suppressed the urge to choke. All you could feel was his fingers working you towards orgasm and his fingers fucking your mouth and sliding against your tongue.

“Fuck you look so beautiful like this, I can’t wait to see those lips around my cock” he groaned, his fingers sliding deeper between your legs, his head leaning over your left shoulder watching your expressions contort as he hit every pleasure center.

After a few moments, he worked the fabric of your panties aside and ran his long, elegant fingers across your clit and down the lips of your pussy, toying with your wet folds. You let loose a moan as he sank a digit deep inside your moist heat, your hips bucking at the wonderful searing sensation. Taehyung was teasing you, toying with you, making you squirm. You could feel the reverberation of his moans against you. He was so incredibly turned on and was enjoying every bit of teasing you. Adding another finger, Taehyung sank his digits in and out, the lewd sounds of your wetness dripping from your core adding to the eroticism of the moment, making you grind yourself further onto his fingers. You could feel your legs becoming weak as he started to hit that spot deep inside of you, his fingers fucking in and out of you at an agonizingly slow pace. Your moans were becoming louder and you could feel your orgasm building. You were losing control and your hips were moving against his fingers, trying to gain more of that heated friction he was giving you. Your high was rapidly approaching, building, threatening to send you hurtling into oblivion. Suddenly, he slowed and removed his fingers, leaving you to whine in protest.

Removing his fingers from your mouth and releasing you from his hold, he guided you masterfully to the floor with one hand on the makeshift leash of his belt and the other bracing your torso. Your lipstick was smeared down your chin and across your cheek and your eyes were glassy in a haze of lust and the throes of a lost orgasm. You were a mess of passion and lust and at that very moment were willing to do whatever he wanted to come on his deliciously long fingers.

“Only good girls get to come, Kitten. You need to earn it.” Taehyung said, unbuttoning his pants and dropping them to the floor all the while still holding his belt taut against your throat.

You felt him tug harshly at your neck, bringing your face to the erection still in his boxers. You looked up towards him and saw him smirk.

“What are you waiting for Kitten? I want to see those pretty lips around my cock.”

Without breaking eye contact, you brought your hands to his black boxers and slid them down his lean thighs, his cock slapping his torso with a dull thud. You ran your hands up his thighs, to his chest, and back down to his manhood. He was long, and thick with an ever so slight upward bend. You grasped him in your hands, working up and down the shaft as you began to deliver small kitten licks to the head and the underside. Taehyung was watching you with an intense gaze, his eyes filled with lust as he watched your tongue explore every inch of him. You were teasing him and you learned very quickly that he wanted more than teasing as he yanked your makeshift collar, forcing your lips onto him.

“I don’t enjoy being teased, Kitten. Suck.”

On his command, you took the head of his cock between your lips and sucked. Taehyung let loose a deep moan as he felt you take him deeper inside of your mouth, his hips languidly rutting his rock-hard member into your mouth. “Yes…f-fuck that’s it. Suck my dick like you mean it” he groaned, his head lolling backwards, his grip still firm on the belt around your neck.

You worked him expertly with your mouth and hands and you could feel the pulsing of his cock as his hips began to force himself deeper into your mouth. His hips moved faster, faster and his moans and pants were growing louder and more desperate. “Fuck, fuck, fuck! Your mouth feels so good Kitten.” His hands wandered into your hair, the belt still wrapped around his fist as he forcefully began to fuck your mouth harder and harder. You suppressed the urge to gag as he worked his cock into your mouth, hitting the back of your throat with each thrust. You were taking quick, desperate breaths between his thrusts, moans slipping out between each. You couldn’t help but feel incredibly aroused at how amazing his cock felt between your lips, how he had you under his control, and the tightness around your throat. You could feel he was about to come but he stopped, pulling himself from your lips, leaving a trail of saliva connecting your tongue and his cock.

“You look so wonderful with your mouth thoroughly fucked, but I think you’d look so much better being fucked by my cock Kitten.” Taehyung groaned, biting his lip as he trailed his fingers across your messy lips.

Taehyung guided you by the belt around your neck towards the extravagant bed of the Red Room, covered in plush red and black pillows. You were so wet you could feel your arousal dripping down your thighs.

“Bend over Kitten. I want to see that pretty pussy of yours.” He commanded, loosening his grip on the belt.

You knelt onto the bed, getting onto all fours and arching your back to give Taehyung a view of your sex. He ran his long, elegant fingers up and down your glistening slit and hissed between his teeth as you whimpered under his touch. He teased you, his fingers making slow strips up and down your core before making delicate circles on your clit. You could feel your pussy throbbing for his touch, to be filled by his cock and it was becoming painful. He then slipped a single digit in and rotated it inside your moist heat, making you fall forwards onto the bed as he curled the digit against your g-spot.  Taehyung was working you once again towards orgasm and you were again losing control, desperately trying to get him to touch you in all the right spots to make you topple over the edge. With a single finger, he had made you a moaning mess, your hips thrusting back onto his finger as he curled it again and again against that one spot that made you see white. He slipped in a second finger and you wanted to come so bad for him that you were pushing your hips further onto his fingers. That is, until you felt a sharp sting across your bottom.

“I didn’t tell you, you could come yet. I told you, only good girls’ get to come.” Taehyung said darkly, stilling his fingers inside you.

You couldn’t help but cry out at the mixture of pleasure and pain.

“P-please Sir! Let me come!” you cried out, tears threatening to spill forth.

Taehyung struck your again, his open palm making contact with the same spot as before, leaving a harsh sting in its place. “Good girls don’t talk back, Kitten. Do I have to punish you more?”

“N-no Sir!” you whimpered, your voice holding back a choked back sob.

You were desperate to come. So, so desperate. And it was destroying your sanity down to the last thread.

Taehyung scoffed. “That’s a good girl,” he rubbed your reddening bottom “Now how about I show you what a good girl gets. Would you like that, Kitten?”

“Yes, S-sir!”

And with that he removed his fingers and thrusted cock deep inside of your velvet heat. You cried out at his harsh thrust as he bottomed out inside of you and the wonderfully sinful pain of his cock stretching your walls to the brink. “Fuck Kitten, you feel so tight…” he trailed off, his thrusts savoring your body as his hands grasped tightly at the flesh of your hips. With each thrust, you could feel him stroking your g-spot. You could again feel your orgasm building with every rut of his hips to you. He thrusted in quickly and withdrew his cock oh so slowly, your juices coating every inch of him and dripping down your thighs.

“S-sir! Oh my God! Your cock is so good!” you cried out, your face buried in the fabric of the duvet, your fists clutched tightly into the thick crimson fabric.

The room was filled with the lewd and salacious sounds of skin slapping on skin, your wetness being pushed out of you as his cock filled your pussy to the brim, and the pants and moans of two people in the throes of passion. “More, please, more! Fuck me more!” you were almost screaming. His thrusts were becoming faster. Faster and faster his hips met your ass, his fingertips digging deeper into your hips, his eyes screwed shut tightly in ecstasy. With every stroke of his cock into your pussy, you felt your orgasm approaching rapidly.

He was taking gasps, needy breaths as he fucked into you harder and harder, your body being forced further up the bed. “I-I can’t hold on anymore! I’m going to come!” you practically screamed as Taehyung’s hips continued to snap to yours.

“Come for me, Kitten! Fucking come on my cock like the slut you are!”

And you came undone, your body filled with a searing sensation coming from deep within your core and spreading throughout every inch of your body. You lost all control as you cried out, your eyes shut tight, your limbs numb and your vision blinded by pleasure, a surge of wet arousal leaking out from your pussy and onto the sheets below. As your pussy throbbed around him, you could feel Taehyung climb onto the bed and with a hand, force you to stay downwards as his thrusts became more uneven and ragged breaths grew louder. He continued to fuck you through your orgasm, his thrusts continuing to send white-hot sparks of pleasure throughout your body.

“Oh fuck! Fuck, fuck fuck! I’m gonna fill you with my cum Kitten! FUCK!” he yelled out amidst your screams of pleasure, his hips snapping to yours as he filled your wet heat with his cum. His head was thrown back in passion as his hips made small, slow thrusts, his cock being milked by the pulsation of your orgasm.

After a few moments, he withdrew his cock from your pussy, letting his cum drip down your folds and mingle with your juices. You lied there in the sheets face down and he collapsed facing the ceiling beside you. The only sound in the room to be heard was the sound of uneven breaths and panting. You couldn’t even so much as lift your dizzy head but it was then that you knew.

He was like a drug to you.

His command, his control, his dominance.

And you wanted more.

[shemakesmusic-uk]

Getting To Know...

Sonia Stein.

London based songsmith Sonia Stein has recently revealed her new single ‘Lover’, produced by Liam Howe (FKA Twigs, Adele, Jessie Ware) the single is a more soulful pop-offering which deftly showcases her extensive vocal range and talent as a performer. View the video below.

'Lover’ follows previous singles ‘Do You Love Me’, 'One of Those Things’, ‘Muse’ & ‘Change Shapes’.

As well as being busy in the studio for most of 2018 finishing off her debut album set for release next year, Sonia has taken her enchanting live set to the Great Escape this year alongside a Sofar Sounds live tour.

We had a chat with the talented artist about the new single and video, what we can expect from the album, touring and more. Read the Q&A below.

Hi Sonia! You've just released your new single 'Lover'. What was the inspiration behind the track?

“Hello! I wrote the track ‘Lover’ about my relationship with another creative. About how even when there is boundless amounts of love, people as individuals need to stay connected to their creativity and to themselves. I suppose its about admitting a sort of co-dependency and working towards staying together but without that element that can feel quite destructive.”

We are loving the dreamy black and white visuals for 'Lover'. How did you come up with the idea for the video?

“The different elements of it came together slowly. I have wanted to work with Phoenix (the choreographer and the blond in the video) for a while now after meeting him a couple of years ago at a Christmas party and it always fell through. I saw his amazing modern voguing style and fell in love with it. So this time when he was available we immediately got to work on the choreography. The black and white visuals in the Palm house of Kew Gardens was a dream. We liked the idea of seeing something we are used to seeing in colour in black and white because suddenly it makes you notice different things about it. Instead of focusing on the beautiful lush greens you suddenly notice textures and big graphic shapes. The story in the video shows the two dancers as the relationship I wrote the song about. Intertwined and in love. I represent stepping out of the relationship, still being a part of it but assuming my own identity. “ 

We hear you've been busy in the studio finishing off your debut album. What can we expect from your first full length?

“Yes, I have been writing new songs and digging up old ones from the archives. I am excited to showcase more of my songwriting style, I want the album to feel very up close and personal, the way I do when I play my songs alone on the piano.“

You've also just finished a European tour with the brilliant Alice Merton. What was that like? What's your favourite thing about being on tour? 

“Supporting Alice was really fun, she had the best audiences that were so receptive. She was also super sweet and supportive. My favourite thing about being on tour is definitely performing. Singing is my first love and being able to do it on stage in front of an audience never gets old.“

Finally, what else is next for Sonia Stein?

“Hopefully lots more live shows!”

‘Lover’ is out now.

[dazzledbyrob]

NEW INTERVIEW & PHOTOSHOOT BY GQ

Robert Pattinson Is Alive Again

The Twilight heartthrob seemed damned to be a brooding ex-vampire forever. But then he drove a stake through his career and got to work resurrecting it.

So it’s settled, says Rob Pattinson, we’re going to do ayahuasca together! Ayahuasca is an Amazonian hallucinogen that people take to journey to the center of themselves, usually with a shaman, usually on a retreat, and it is a totally normal and valid way for us to spend one of our two days together, I completely agree. Yes, Rob, let’s do it. For the great big stunt of our GQ cover story, let’s take great big doses of ayahuasca. Let’s slide down the gooey tunnels of our ids until we Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich. Then I look it up. There’s a really long period of your trip where you’re just vomiting. But we’re up for some vomiting! Nobody here is a newborn babe who can’t handle a little reverse peristalsis! We just met, after all, and what better way to get to know each other than a little kayak into each other’s insides? Me and Rob Pattinson! Vomiting up a storm! What a story! But—but—maybe all that vomiting would make it hard to talk? Maybe it would change our psyches irreparably and return us to our loved ones forever altered? It might, right? Back to the drawing board. But you know what they say: There are no wrong ideas in a brainstorm.

So it’s settled, says Rob Pattinson, we’re going to swim with sharks! No one’s done that, right? The best way we can get close to some edge of existence, he thinks, is to swim with sharks, daring them to eat us. I suggest that maybe ayahuasca brings us to the edge of existence, too? And wouldn’t it be hard for me to write this if one of us (me) got eaten by one of those sharks? Sure, sure, he gets it. Anyway, he says, “I’m afraid something will happen that makes me look like a pussy.” Which is fair, and so we’re not going to do it. So it’s settled, says Rob Pattinson, we’re going to a Russian spa in West Hollywood! Sure! Let’s sit together in a spa, me in my bathing suit and you, Rob Pattinson, in yours, and you can talk about your workout regimen, and I can tell you about the care and maintenance of my C-section scars! Both of them! Argh, but a friend told him he’d seen Justin Bieber there, and Pattinson was like, no way, he will not be Bieber-derivative, which I support. (And usually spas are gender-separated?)

So it’s settled, says Rob Pattinson, he’s gonna come to me! Yes, he wants to infiltrate my suburban life. How’s that for turning this whole thing on its head? He’ll come to where I have coffee every day, at the Able Baker, and we’ll have a latte and a cookie, then haul over to do camp pickup with the kids. Yes! Me and Rob Pattinson! In New Jersey! Yes, come on over, Rob. The kids get picked up at 3:50! Bring a snack or the younger one will bitch you out for hours! Shoot, no, he has to go to Paris to get photographed for his Dior campaign in two days, so that won’t work with my deadline.

Pattinson, bless him, brings an unfiltered, uncut fire to each idea. Me, I am getting whiplash from nodding vigorously as I consider them. I am excited just to bear witness to his enthusiasm for all the ways you could eat the world. But I am also inspired by him. He really wants us to walk out of here with an amazing plan. Here, incidentally, is a very quiet, virtually unknown café that he likes, just a few blocks from his house in some part of some part of Los Angeles. He asks that I don’t print where this is, since he comes here a lot, mostly because of the [privacy feature]. He sits here every day, same table, eating the same [house special scramble], hold the [thing that makes the scramble delicious], and he never sees anyone here, and he’d like to keep it that way. Sure, I say. Suddenly, his eyes are a fever. He knows what we’re going to do. “Let’s get fecal-matter transplants,” he says. This is roughly his ninth suggestion (I’ve spared you some) for how we might spend our time together, but it’s number one in experimental procedures that are not yet fully FDA-approved. He’s been reading about it—he reads about everything, from stories about psychology to linguistics to fecal matter—and he cannot stop thinking about the possibilities. “It works,” he insists. “You can have an athlete’s shit put inside you and then you’re an athlete afterwards.” Imagine that! An athlete’s shit! Turning you into an athlete! It’s real! It might be real. It’s probably not real. But he’s just read about a woman with chronic fatigue who did a DIY fecal transplant and now she is totally fine. In fact, someone Pattinson knows did it; he spoke to that someone just yesterday, and that someone’s life has changed materially as a result—he can’t tell me who it is, because that someone is someone, but my God, we need to do this. So here’s the deal: We’re going to transplant each other’s fecal matter! I will become more like Rob; Rob will become more like me. No one’s ever done that before, right?

I look up from my notebook and blink. He is rubbing the fine layer of stubble resting luckily on his jawline, which you could hang your dry cleaning on. We sit back and consider. You know, if this is too hard, we could just come here again, I say. Maybe we could just not do anything and just come here. He shakes his head. That won’t do. No, we’re going to do something. He stares at the iced coffee he ordered. He used to drink “a million” cups a day, but lately, since he turned 31, he finds that it’s making him crazy. “Yeah,” he says, “if I have a little bit too much, I’ll suddenly think the trapdoor in the bottom of my life is falling.” Plus, too much coffee is like truth serum for him (hey, what if we did truth serum?), but he still loves coffee. So far he’s had maybe one and a half fingers of a regular-size cup. He puts his fist up to his heart. “I already feel like I had a speedball.” He lets out a kind of cackling laugh after he says this—head back, launching upward—but it comes out almost like a moon-howl. He laughs like this after almost everything he says, which is an intense way to communicate. When he talks, he tugs on the chest hair near his clavicle so that the bits of skin attached to each follicle pull up and form a miniature mountain range. We sit perpendicular to each other, and he keeps on his Helmut Lang sunglasses. Sometimes he looks at me, but mostly he looks at his scramble and at his dog, Solo, whom he has brought along—he shares the dog with his romantic partner, the experimental British musician FKA Twigs—and who has a Mohawk. "I can commit so wholeheartedly because I think it’s so stressful being in a thing where you’re just constantly second-guessing everything all the time.” Okay, so a fecal transplant. Check. A doctor will creep his (or her!) way into our colons and replace our poop with each other’s poop. Why not? What do we have to risk, other than infection and death?

So it’s settled, I say. I am game for it. I was game for all the others, too, because this is exciting for me, for someone to be as into this as much as I am. Maybe he wants to do something he’s never done before, or see something he’s never seen before, or be someone he’s never been before. It seems like this is the only criterion for how he wants to spend our time, just as it seems to be the only common denominator among the movies he chooses to make now: It has to be something new. It has to deliver a real connection. It has to teach him something about himself and test him. His new movie—his first starring role in years, made by a pair of gifted young brothers named Ben and Josh Safdie—is definitely a test. It’s called Good Time, and it is a locomotive that will grab you by the chest hairs near your clavicle for 100 minutes; Pattinson classifies it as the “panic genre.” He plays a desperate low-level con artist in Queens trying to protect his little brother after a bank robbery gone wrong. Without giving too much away, let’s just say it’s intoxicating to watch someone never slow down over the course of 24 hours and not once in that time make a good decision. Yes, the new Rob Pattinson is defined by his willingness to go berserk or go home. But maybe it’s just on-screen. Already Pattinson is reconsidering the fecal matter. Fecal transplants probably aren’t something that can be arranged in a day, even when you’re Rob Pattinson. Probably you need a diagnosis code or something. They probably aren’t as easily accessible as a colonic, and at this point who hasn’t done a colonic with a journalist? Anyway, he adds, maybe with some menace, “if we did a swap, I don’t know if you’d be able to handle my shit.” As we continue to discuss ideas for our big something, I bat away my thought about what these ideas also have in common, which is that they all render me incapacitated, unable to ask him any questions, and him unable to answer any. We’d be in different rooms, or on a hallucinogen, or in the belly of a shark, or in surgery, for Chrissake. But no, it couldn’t be that. It has to be this: That after years of playing dead, Rob Pattinson feels alive again. Yes, that has to be it.

He spent his formative acting years suspended in Twilight, playing a vampire who mostly just stood there, brooding—an inert emo-reactor to his cis-mortal heroine, played by Kristen Stewart. If you’ve never heard of it, because you were in an underground prison with no access to the outside world, or even other prisoners, a brief recap: It’s about two co-dependent teenagers (one of whom has been a teenager for 100 years) in a super-toxic relationship that unfolds over five movies in the small town of Forks. The blood of this lonely, virginal teenage girl gives off a scent that is like heroin to this teenage vampire who lives there, meaning he wants to eat her but also that he wants to love her. By the end of the third movie, they still haven’t slept together. Finally, in movie four, the two have sex, which they feared might kill her. But she then immediately becomes pregnant, and that actually does kill her. What is the opposite of subtext? Did I mention the town where this takes place is called Forks? “When I find someone who I have an instinct about, I find it quite easy to completely give myself to that person.” When the cameras stopped rolling, Pattinson was surrounded by oceans of admirers who made his world small and paranoid. So you can maybe understand why, freed up by all of those coffins full of Twilight residuals, Pattinson is now doing what he’s always wanted to do: making movies that are relentless and dark and kinetic and subversive. He could’ve gone a lot of different ways after Twilight; the world loves a pallid British super-villain. But it would’ve been more standing still: the CGI, the green screens, the waiting around in his trailer. Plus, he says, “I think you have to have a specific type of confidence to be in those movies.” He was confident he didn’t. He couldn’t just stand there and be defiant, the way villains do. He couldn’t stay on one note and mean it.

Instead, he plunged himself into a series of gritty art-house movies, which, of course, is a strategy favored by just about every teen idol trying to go legit. But this is different in that he doesn’t appear to be picking these projects with a calculated eye toward prestige, or even edge. His recent films are unified primarily by the fact that they feature directors who are great and mostly unheralded, and characters who are a little scary to play. Hardly anyone saw any of these movies, and he says he never expected them to. The point wasn’t for people to see the movies. And so far, he’s been right nearly every time. So far, it appears that Rob Pattinson has killer taste. Cosmopolis, his first post-Twilight movie, gave him the chance to work with his lifelong hero and favorite director, David Cronenberg, and to try his hand at (a very dark sort of) comedy. His character, a nihilist finance bro in the age of Occupy Wall Street, sits in the back of a limo for the duration of the film. He loved Cronenberg. He loved working for his hero. But still, there wasn’t a lot of movement. Edward Cullen’s most notable attribute, besides his looks—powdered face, strong lip, clenched jaw, which would slice through his hand if he rested it there—was his stillness. After that, he wanted some motion. He wanted to floor it. He started noticing how supporting roles got to be wilder and more eccentric, how they weren’t subject to the stolid requirements of a leading man, so he went and did a bunch of those— The Rover, Queen of the Desert, The Lost City of Z —much smaller films that allowed him to move, tinker, alter his appearance. You could watch The Rover, a brutal Australian-made post-apocalyptic heist-revenge tale, without realizing until the credits roll that you’ve been watching Rob Pattinson the whole time. “Yeah?” he asks happily when I say this to him. He loves that. Hearing that is the best thing he could hear. Next up: a project with the visually sumptuous French filmmaker Claire Denis, someone he’s been wanting to work with forever. “It’s a lot about sexual fantasy,” he tells me, “and how your past intermingles, and this thing about kind of having your semen stolen from you in a spaceship and like forcibly impregnating people.” Look for it in theaters soon!

Pattinson came across the Safdie brothers in his endless reading. What caught his eye was a single still image from the last movie they directed, a much admired 2014 heroin-junkie drama called Heaven Knows What: It was a close-up of the film’s star, Arielle Holmes—stringy-haired and staring warily beneath a hot pink filter—whom the Safdies met one day in Manhattan’s Diamond District and decided to make a movie about. When Pattinson first saw the image, on a film-geek website, the movie wasn’t even out yet. But he couldn’t look away. He reached out to them immediately with a blind note saying he was a huge fan and that he wanted to be in their next project. Just to reiterate: He hadn’t even seen the movie yet. But he didn’t care. He was hooked. “I want to disappear into a role,” he told them. Good Time did not exist in any form until Pattinson reached out. The Safdies were in the middle of another movie when they got Pattinson’s note, but they invited him to talk and showed him the finished version of Heaven Knows What. “He said he just wanted to be part of that energy,” Josh Safdie told me. “Rob is constantly overturning rocks to see if he can find a worm to eat. He is genuinely interested in discovering things.” To prepare for Good Time, Pattinson spent weeks in New York just walking around Queens, asking friends of the Safdie brothers to read the lines from his script back to him until he got the accent right. He read The Executioner’s Song and In the Belly of the Beast because Josh mentioned them in passing. He lost weight, dyed his hair blond, got two actual earrings (he didn’t realize the holes never go away), and began to creep into the role of Connie, a petty criminal with dubious morals, redeemed only by his devotion to his intellectually disabled brother. One day, Pattinson and Ben Safdie, who plays the brother, went into a Dunkin’ Donuts in Yonkers, and Ben tried ordering coffee in character, getting more and more agitated, just as his character would. Pattinson, in character as well, tried not so gently to subdue him. “When I find someone who I have an instinct about,” Pattinson says, “who’s going to just push forward, I find it quite easy to completely give myself to that person. And I can commit so wholeheartedly because I think it’s so stressful being in a thing where you’re just constantly second-guessing everything all the time.” On the other hand, now that he’s the star, now that the movies are so much smaller than the franchise machines that run on their own power, like Twilight, he has a new set of responsibilities. He knows a movie like Good Time would not be the subject of much mainstream attention—remember, it probably wouldn’t even exist—without his name on it. He knows that he has reached the stage of his career where he can use his immense fame to bring attention to a very worthy, very difficult movie like this one. But now, sitting here, he realizes he doesn’t really know what to say to me about it. He doesn’t love this part, the selling part, and he’s struggling for the right words. “I’m not very good at sending a message,” he tells me. This is Rob Pattinson’s conundrum in 2017. He can disappear into roles. He can become someone new. But when he shows up to talk about the career he has now, the career of his dreams, people still mistake him for the tabloid tween sensation he was a few years ago, whose personal life was everywhere, who knew he was going to get asked about it in every interview and hated every second of it. He still does, which is why every minute we’re together I see him watching me warily, waiting for me to pounce.

Pattinson was cast in Twilight when he was 21, and throughout his four-year run, he and his co-stars would get dragged to shopping malls to do promotion. Those were the days when he spoke freely. Nervous girls would ask him everything from when Edward and Bella were finally going to bone to how he styled his hair. He told them, “I have 12-year-old virgins lick it.” He was hooded and dragged off to media training by studio executives, and from then on, in any interview he did, he was surrounded by several anxious publicists ready to tase him if he got out of line again. The paparazzi descended upon him in a way we hadn’t seen since Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were a thing. (They were once a thing!) Tabloids camped outside his home. “People were like, ‘It’s fine, who cares?’ ” he says now. “ ‘They’re just photos or whatever.’ They’ll say, ‘Just live your life.’ But that’s not life for me, if someone’s observing it.” During the height of the Twilight madness, he had each of his friends call Ubers while he traded outfits with them in the restaurant bathroom, so that photographers wouldn’t know which car he got into, and then he sent all the Ubers in different directions, because drop dead. He rode around in the trunks of cars “constantly,” he says, because fuck you. At one point he had five rental cars and kept them, along with a change of clothes, in parking lots around town. If he was being followed, he’d dip into one of the lots, switch his clothing and his car, and leave. One day, coming home from Venice, he realized he was being tailed. He drove around for hours because he didn’t want anyone to know where his new house was. Finally, as the sun came up, he pulled over and got out of the car and approached one of the photographers. “You’ve gotten your pictures,” he said. “Can I please just go home now?” “No,” the guy told him. “My boss says I can’t come back until I know where your new house is. Sorry, man.” Pattinson never tried to negotiate or appeal to their humanity again. “There are ways to disappear, like, fairly easily,” he tells me. “It just involves effort, and most people can’t be bothered to put the effort in.” Finally, he won. And he didn’t win because tabloids changed or because Twilight ended or even because he and Kristen Stewart broke up, a breakup instigated, of course, by the very paparazzi they had worked so hard to dodge (look it up). No, he won because he had more money than they did: They simply couldn’t afford the gas and unbillable hours that led to no billable shot. “As soon as I saw a tail, I would just disappear again. It worked after a while. They’re just like, ‘Oh, the guy is just a hassle.’ ” He had cracked the code; he was free. “There are ways to disappear, like, fairly easily,” he tells me. “But you have to be living a quite strange life. It just involves effort, and most people can’t really be bothered to put the effort in.” Things are easier now; not perfect, but easier. Just yesterday he was walking Solo—his girlfriend named the dog—and he saw a photographer, and he hid his face and then was angry at himself, because he knows that hiding your face is a story. As he tells me about it, he tightens that jaw that jaw that jaw, which you could luge down, but then he relaxes and remembers what it used to be like. Put it this way: He was walking his dog outside. He thinks Instagram has taken the heat off of him; it’s taken some of the fire out of the tabloids’ pursuit of movie stars. Now they chase the Insta-models and reality stars. Sometimes they chase one another. But he has no animosity for any of them, he says. “They’re just losers trying to do their jobs.”

What he is trying to say is—no offense to me personally, of course—he would rather not be here. “It’s technically part of my job, but I’ve never been very good at it,” he says. And anyway, “I’ve never been that concerned if someone sees the movie,” which he knows you’re not supposed to say aloud and maybe doesn’t entirely mean, but there you go. His eyes briefly shift toward me with suspicion. He’s sure this is what I’m after—something incendiary, maybe even something about his ex-girlfriend, or something about Twigs. (He only accidentally lets me know he calls her that—Twigs—twice: once in relation to who named the dog they both own and also in relation to the ugliness they both experienced when their relationship became public and people on Twitter spewed racist garbage about her.) In fact, Pattinson tells me, he went to therapy a few years ago during a low time, and the therapist often remarked how good he was at talking without saying anything. Now he applies this skill whenever he’s forced to hang out with people like me. “If I could stay silent,” he says, “I would.” He’s convinced that I’ll take whatever I learn and make his loved ones’ lives a hellscape. Back in the Twilight days, someone Googled his sisters’ names and started hounding them at work. He realized that he should never say anyone’s name—not his ex’s name, not Twigs’s name. (Just watch this. Me: “Are you getting married?” Him: “Eh...,” then laughs.) He tries to make a point in interviews of saying nothing that isn’t already known: “I always think the risk reward is very much weighted in the wrong direction.”

But it’s not just his personal life that he refuses to dive into. He’s also alarmed by the prospect that if he says the wrong thing about a film he’s trying to promote, it could be a disaster. “We live in very sensitive times,” he says. One false move, he says, and it becomes the story of the movie, undoing a lot of good people’s hard work. I surmise, but he will not confirm, that he is referring to several bits in the movie that might go over some p.c. line that the Internet has drawn. I ask him to give me an example—one example—of a movie where this happened, where a single remark or bit of gossip derailed the whole thing. He looks at me searchingly, shaking his head. He doesn’t want to name anything because he assumes that will get him into trouble, too, shitting on someone else’s movie. But I sit quietly and wait. I can wait all day. Finally, he’s got one. “Like Waterworld, for instance.” I look up from my notebook and squint. The Kevin Costner movie? “It’s one of the greatest movies ever made,” he continues, “and everyone said it was bad. And for years everyone was like, ‘This is a terrible movie.’ And now people are watching it and the veil is being taken away.” I am momentarily speechless. Then I confirm whether he’s actually seen Waterworld. He has. Later, I will check to make sure there isn’t a Sidney Lumet movie that’s also called Waterworld. There isn’t. Already he regrets saying this, invoking his beloved Waterworld. He looks down at the coffee. He gets a far-off look in his eyes, staring straight ahead, over my shoulder, at the restaurant wall. He looks at me again and pushes out a micro-sigh. He tells me a story about filming The Rover in 2014, in a town in Australia with a population of 90, several hours north of Adelaide. He could stand out in the open desert, taking a piss. “I know no one can see this,” he thought then. He could barely get his head around it. Just four years earlier, he was filming a movie in Central Park, and 3,000 people came out to watch. For anyone else it would be just a regular piss. For Pattinson, it was the urination of liberation.

So after all that, we end up playing golf, something he’s never done before and I’ve only done for other articles. It was his suggestion, as out of nowhere as the others. It stuck simply because it was the last thing he thought of before there was no time to think of anything else, so we got ourselves a last-minute tee time. He shows up this time in a gingham shirt, unbuttoned to just below the thorax, a baseball cap, and sneakers. He is less anxious than yesterday; he is happier when he is moving. Calmer, too. We rent a golf cart and make it through exactly one hole before it becomes clear that the combination of our ineptitude at golf and cackle-moon-howl laughter does not jibe well with the foul humor of the Angelenos who are available to play golf on a Friday afternoon at 3:12—a time that is called the Twilight slot, if you can believe it. We do not know quite where to put our tees. We do not know where we should be aiming our balls. There are people behind us and people in front of us, and perhaps we hadn’t considered how very, very seriously other people take golf. We decide to bail. I get into the golf cart with him, and he has to drive backward in order for us to make our escape. He does it at full speed, swerving in reverse with the confidence of a man who has been chased down by innocent-looking Priuses with devious-looking photographers hanging out the driver’s-side window. “We are going really fast,” I say.

He turns briefly toward me and gives me a funny look. “No, we’re not.” I was right all along, you know. Sure, yes, all the activities he suggested were about doing something cool he’d never done before, but mostly they were about not talking. Maybe I was being naive, but you have to know I go into each one of these with a heart clouded by optimism and a willingness to believe the best in everyone. He is searching for something new in his work and in his life—that’s all real. But his ulterior motive became unavoidable after we played one hole of golf. You try asking a question with a tape recorder jammed under your bra strap and your notepad under your armpit so that you can hit a ball nowhere near the hole.

“I want to be misunderstood. People are always changing, and the more you put something down in print, people form opinions and they’re constantly creating who they think you are.” After we return the cart, Pattinson and I hit the restaurant in the clubhouse. We sit with beers served in glasses the size of fishbowls and eat hot dogs (ketchup and mustard). I try again for even one iota of intimate conversation. But he just asks me why he would ever answer. So I think back on all the interviews I’ve done, and I tell him very honestly that I think it’s because people want to be heard. Most of us, even the most famous of us—sometimes especially the most famous of us—want to be understood. “I don’t,” he says. “I want to be misunderstood. People are always changing, and the more you put something down in print, people form opinions and they’re constantly creating who they think you are. If you do something that contradicts that, or if you do something which goes out of that box, then you can look like a liar or something like that.” He prefers to stay nimble, you see. There will be less to combat later if someone like me can’t throw his words in his face. It’s just not worth it, he says. Especially now. Especially now that he’s finally back among the living. Living is picking the movies you want, reacting to the world as it comes. Living is walking your dog. That’s why he isn’t giving me shit, he tells me. He hopes I understand. It’s for the best, he says. He’s alive again. Finally he’s alive again. Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a GQ correspondent. This story originally appeared in the September 2017 issue with the title "The Second Coming of Robert Pattinson."

[movietvtechgeeks]

Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/taylor-swift-grope-action-begins-robert-pattinson-katy-perry-time/

Taylor Swift grope action begins while Robert Pattinson has Katy Perry time

About a week ago, it became unclear whether or not former Twilight star Robert Pattison was still with his fiancée FKA Twigs. While doing a guest spot on The Howard Stern Show, the actor said that he was “kind of” engaged to the songstress. Over the weekend, Robert was seen cozying up and dining with another female star, further fueling the rumors that he is no longer in a relationship with FKA Twigs. On Saturday, Robert was spotted having dinner with “Feels” singer Katy Perry. The two stars enjoyed a late meal at the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood, where eyewitnesses claim that the two were sitting very close to one another. This isn’t the first time that Katy and Robert have found themselves the subject of romance rumors. In fact, when Robert first broke up with his longtime girlfriend Kristen Stewart, people speculated that he had rebounded with Katy. However, Katy later clarified to a media publication that she and Robert were merely friends and she was not looking to “disrespect” Kristen by going after her ex so soon after their break up. In addressing the romance rumors, the “Fireworks” singer previously noted, “I sent [Kristen] a text message saying: ‘I know you’ve seen all this stuff but you know I would never disrespect you. I’m not that person.’” Nonetheless, it seems as though Katy and Robert keep finding their way back to one another. We will just have to wait and see if a romance actually finally blossoms between the two stars this time around… With Taylor Swift looking on, potential jurors in her lawsuit against an ex-Denver radio host were asked Monday if they had ever been inappropriately touched or wrongly accused of groping someone - the issues at the center of the case. A 15-page questionnaire released as jury selection began in the dueling lawsuits also asked candidates if they had seen any pictures related to the case - a possible reference to a photo that shows DJ David Mueller with his right hand behind the pop superstar, just below her waist, before a 2013 concert in Denver. The photo was obtained by TMZ then sealed by a judge earlier in the case. Swift claims Mueller grabbed her on the buttock during a meet-and-greet photo session at the show. Her lawyers have called the photo "damning" proof that Mueller groped her. Mueller, who also attended jury selection, denies the allegation and says the photo only shows him trying to jump into the frame. Swift and Mueller are both smiling in the picture. However, they weren't even looking at each other in court on Monday. Mueller, wearing a dark suit, sat at the plaintiff's table with his back turned to Swift, who sat at a nearby table with her mother, Andrea Swift, and their attorneys. [pdf-embedder url="https://movietvtechgeeks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/taylor-swift-jury-selection-questionnaire.pdf" title="taylor swift jury selection questionnaire"] Mueller often appeared to be reading documents while Swift watched the proceedings closely, occasionally conferring with her counsel. In his lawsuit, Mueller claims he was fired from his job at a country music station after Taylor's team wrongfully told his boss that Mueller had groped her. He is seeking at least $3 million in damages. Swift's countersuit against Mueller claims sexual assault. Swift appeared in court in a white dress and black jacket, even though she and Mueller were not required to attend until the actual trial begins. Potential jurors were asked whether they are fans of either Mueller or Swift, including if they had ever seen Swift in concert, downloaded or purchased her music, or attended the 2013 concert. The jury questionnaire also said anyone who is uncomfortable with discussing any instances of inappropriate touching can speak to the judge in private. The eight-member jury will be chosen from a pool of 60 candidates, court spokesman Jeff Colwell said. There will be no alternates. The selection process could last through Tuesday, with opening statements to follow. One juror was dismissed over his answer to the question, "In a lawsuit between David Mueller and Taylor Swift would you have bias for or against either Taylor Swift or David Mueller?" The potential juror answered, "She seems petty and spiteful." The case is being heard in federal court because Swift and Mueller live in different states - Swift in Nashville, Tennessee, Mueller in Colorado - and damages at stake exceed $75,000. The trial is expected to last about two weeks. Court documents say it is unlikely that either side will settle. Swift is seeking a verdict that awards her $1, while holding Mueller responsible and "serving as an example to other women who may resist publicly reliving similar outrageous and humiliating acts," her lawsuit says. Swift and Mueller are both expected to testify, along with Mueller's former boss and members of Swift's entourage. Mueller, then 51, was a morning host at a country music station when he was assigned to attend Swift's concert at the Pepsi Center in Denver. Mueller was backstage with his girlfriend when they met with Swift, then 23, in a curtained enclosure. They posed for a photo and left. Later, Swift's bodyguard confronted Mueller with the allegation that the DJ had reached under the singer's dress and grabbed her. Mueller denied the allegation and says he asked that they call the police. He and his girlfriend were escorted out of the arena and a member of Swift's team called his boss. Swift never went to the police. She tried to keep the situation "discreet and quiet and confidential" and was upset by Mueller's claim that "for some reason she might have some incentive to actually fabricate this story," her attorney, Douglas Baldridge, has argued in court. Mueller's attorney, Gabriel McFarland, argues that Mueller may have been misidentified after someone else touched Swift. In addition to Swift, Mueller named her mother and a member of her team as defendants in the lawsuit. In other celebrity romance news, actress Amber Heard and business mogul Elon Musk have reportedly split. The two have been dating for about a year, as they went public with their relationship just a few short months after Amber filed for divorce from her ex Johnny Depp. Back in April of this year, Amber made her relationship with Elon Musk social media-official, as she took to her Instagram page to share a picture of her and Elon enjoying a romantic dinner date. In the flirty photo, Amber is seen wearing a bold dark lipstick, while Elon dons a noticeable kiss mark on his right cheek. Amber Heard, Instagram post: During the duration of their relationship, the duo spent a lot of time together overseas. In fact, on numerous occasions they were seen enjoying each other’s company down in Australia, where Amber has been busy on the set of Aquaman.   One source close to the former celebrity couple spoke to media publication US Weekly about Amber and Elon’s unexpected split. They explained, “The timing wasn’t good for them. He’s super busy and works all the time. Amber is filming [Aquaman] in Australia until October. She’s in no position to settle with him. She feels her career is just starting.” When you are a star like Beyoncé, even your casual nights out with friends and family make the media and tabloid headlines. This is precisely what happened on Friday night, when the Lemonade artist joined her husband and a group of friends for a fun night at World On Wheels  - which is a retro roller skating rink in Los Angeles. Once Beyoncé unexpectedly popped up at the venue, fellow roller rink-goers went into a full frenzy, as many could not believe that the singer would just show up at such a public venue. Many witnesses took videos and pictures of the beauty, subsequently posting them to their various social media platforms. An insider, who was also at World on Wheels on Friday gushed to, “[Beyoncé] was laughing and enjoying herself. [She and her friends] came really casual. If you didn’t know who they were they could’ve just fit in the crowd.”   According to media outlet TMZ, Beyoncé and her crew arrived to the venue just before midnight. It did not take long for fellow roller skaters to take notice of the celebrities (Jay Z and Beyoncé), which inevitably led to the venue being shut down by 12:30 so that Beyoncé and her crew could have some private skating time. Before the latest US Presidential Election was held, reality star Caitlyn Jenner repeatedly offered her support to Republican candidate Donald Trump over fellow Democratic candidate Hilary Clinton. While most Americans within the transgender community agreed that Hilary would be much better for them and their efforts, Caitlyn insisted that Donald would be a great President for the transgender people, if elected (which he inevitably was).   Since coming into office, Donald has turned his back on the transgender community in many regards. In fact, just recently he announced that transgender men and women would no longer be able to serve in the US military. Caitlyn, as well as many other transgender activists and supporters, spoke out against this decision and reprimanded Trump for his disappointing actions. Despite recently speaking out against the current US President, Caitlyn was spotted wearing one of his infamous “Make America Great Again” hats last weekend. Inevitably, this raised a lot of eyebrows, as many could not understand how she would continue to support Trump through all of his destructive antics. After realizing that people were criticizing her choice in headwear, Caitlyn made an official statement to TMZ in attempt to save face. The former I Am Cait star told the outlet, “I apologize to all of the trans community. I made a mistake [wearing the “Make America Great Again”] hat. I will never do it again and I’m getting rid of the hat.” According to TMZ, the star claims that she completely forgot that she had the infamous hat in her hand and therefore, did not think twice when she put it on her head. Sources close to Caitlyn report that the former Olympian is thinking about autographing the controversial hat and auctioning it off to raise money for a transgender cause. Padma Lakshmi, the host of the "Top Chef" reality TV show, testified Monday that she was "petrified" when a Teamster confronted her while union members were picketing outside a Boston-area restaurant where the series filmed in 2014. Lakshmi, who is also an author and model, said she was a passenger in a vehicle outside the Steel & Rye restaurant in Milton, just south of Boston, where a group of men had formed a line so vehicles could not move forward. She said one man leaned his arm on her door and said: " 'Oh, lookie here, what a pretty face' or 'What a shame about that pretty face.' " "I felt he was bullying me," Lakshmi said. "I felt he was saying, 'I might hit you.' " Lakshmi's testimony came during the federal trial of four members of Teamsters Local 25. The men have pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy to extort, and aiding and abetting. Prosecutors allege they threatened and harassed the crew of the Bravo show's non-union production company. They claim the Teamsters were trying to shut down the filming of "Top Chef" if the show did not hire Teamsters to drive production vehicles. The show had already hired its own drivers. Lakshmi said the man who spoke to her also shouted something "derogatory" to her driver. "I could hear a lot of yelling, exchanges," she said. "They all seemed heated up." Lakshmi said she does not have any role in hiring for the production company. Gail Simmons, a judge on "Top Chef," also testified Monday, saying she was "incredibly afraid" as she arrived at the restaurant and saw the men block the vehicle's path. "One of the men put his head into the van and started yelling at us," Simmons said. Lawyers for the teamsters have said the men were merely exercising their right to picket for driving jobs. They've said "Top Chef" crew members escalated the incident in Milton. The estate of Michael Jackson says a 3-D version of the late singer's iconic "Thriller" video is set to debut at the Venice Film Festival more than 30 years after its original premiere. The estate says the "latest available technology" was used to convert the 14-minute short film from an original 35mm negative to 3-D. Although the film wasn't reedited or recut in any way, director John Landis says he was able to "use the 3-D creatively" and promises "a rather shocking surprise." "Michael Jackson's Thriller" debuted in theaters and on television in 1983. An hour-long documentary detailing the making of the video will also screen at the Venice festival, which runs from Aug. 30 to Sept. 9. Jackson died in 2009 at the age of 50. Ed Sheeran, Miley Cyrus, the Weeknd and host Katy Perry will perform at the MTV Video Music Awards later this month. MTV announced Monday that Lorde, Shawn Mendes, Fifth Harmony and Thirty Seconds to Mars will also hit the stage Aug. 27 at the Forum in Inglewood, California. More performers will be announced at a later date. Kendrick Lamar is the top VMA contender with eight nominations. His hit, "Humble," will compete for video of the year with Bruno Mars' "24K Magic," DJ Khaled and Rihanna's "Wild Thoughts," the Weeknd's "Reminder" and Alessia Cara's "Scars to Your Beautiful." Sheeran is nominated for artist of the year along with Lamar, Mars, Ariana Grande, Lorde and the Weeknd.

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[dazzledbyrob]

NEW INTERVIEW & PHOTOSHOOT BY GQ

Robert Pattinson Is Alive Again

The Twilight heartthrob seemed damned to be a brooding ex-vampire forever. But then he drove a stake through his career and got to work resurrecting it.

So it’s settled, says Rob Pattinson, we’re going to do ayahuasca together! Ayahuasca is an Amazonian hallucinogen that people take to journey to the center of themselves, usually with a shaman, usually on a retreat, and it is a totally normal and valid way for us to spend one of our two days together, I completely agree. Yes, Rob, let’s do it. For the great big stunt of our GQ cover story, let’s take great big doses of ayahuasca. Let’s slide down the gooey tunnels of our ids until we Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich. Then I look it up. There’s a really long period of your trip where you’re just vomiting. But we’re up for some vomiting! Nobody here is a newborn babe who can’t handle a little reverse peristalsis! We just met, after all, and what better way to get to know each other than a little kayak into each other’s insides? Me and Rob Pattinson! Vomiting up a storm! What a story! But—but—maybe all that vomiting would make it hard to talk? Maybe it would change our psyches irreparably and return us to our loved ones forever altered? It might, right? Back to the drawing board. But you know what they say: There are no wrong ideas in a brainstorm.

So it’s settled, says Rob Pattinson, we’re going to swim with sharks! No one’s done that, right? The best way we can get close to some edge of existence, he thinks, is to swim with sharks, daring them to eat us. I suggest that maybe ayahuasca brings us to the edge of existence, too? And wouldn’t it be hard for me to write this if one of us (me) got eaten by one of those sharks? Sure, sure, he gets it. Anyway, he says, “I’m afraid something will happen that makes me look like a pussy.” Which is fair, and so we’re not going to do it. So it’s settled, says Rob Pattinson, we’re going to a Russian spa in West Hollywood! Sure! Let’s sit together in a spa, me in my bathing suit and you, Rob Pattinson, in yours, and you can talk about your workout regimen, and I can tell you about the care and maintenance of my C-section scars! Both of them! Argh, but a friend told him he’d seen Justin Bieber there, and Pattinson was like, no way, he will not be Bieber-derivative, which I support. (And usually spas are gender-separated?)

So it’s settled, says Rob Pattinson, he’s gonna come to me! Yes, he wants to infiltrate my suburban life. How’s that for turning this whole thing on its head? He’ll come to where I have coffee every day, at the Able Baker, and we’ll have a latte and a cookie, then haul over to do camp pickup with the kids. Yes! Me and Rob Pattinson! In New Jersey! Yes, come on over, Rob. The kids get picked up at 3:50! Bring a snack or the younger one will bitch you out for hours! Shoot, no, he has to go to Paris to get photographed for his Dior campaign in two days, so that won’t work with my deadline.

Pattinson, bless him, brings an unfiltered, uncut fire to each idea. Me, I am getting whiplash from nodding vigorously as I consider them. I am excited just to bear witness to his enthusiasm for all the ways you could eat the world. But I am also inspired by him. He really wants us to walk out of here with an amazing plan. Here, incidentally, is a very quiet, virtually unknown café that he likes, just a few blocks from his house in some part of some part of Los Angeles. He asks that I don’t print where this is, since he comes here a lot, mostly because of the [privacy feature]. He sits here every day, same table, eating the same [house special scramble], hold the [thing that makes the scramble delicious], and he never sees anyone here, and he’d like to keep it that way. Sure, I say. Suddenly, his eyes are a fever. He knows what we’re going to do. “Let’s get fecal-matter transplants,” he says. This is roughly his ninth suggestion (I’ve spared you some) for how we might spend our time together, but it’s number one in experimental procedures that are not yet fully FDA-approved. He’s been reading about it—he reads about everything, from stories about psychology to linguistics to fecal matter—and he cannot stop thinking about the possibilities. “It works,” he insists. “You can have an athlete’s shit put inside you and then you’re an athlete afterwards.” Imagine that! An athlete’s shit! Turning you into an athlete! It’s real! It might be real. It’s probably not real. But he’s just read about a woman with chronic fatigue who did a DIY fecal transplant and now she is totally fine. In fact, someone Pattinson knows did it; he spoke to that someone just yesterday, and that someone’s life has changed materially as a result—he can’t tell me who it is, because that someone is someone, but my God, we need to do this. So here’s the deal: We’re going to transplant each other’s fecal matter! I will become more like Rob; Rob will become more like me. No one’s ever done that before, right?

I look up from my notebook and blink. He is rubbing the fine layer of stubble resting luckily on his jawline, which you could hang your dry cleaning on. We sit back and consider. You know, if this is too hard, we could just come here again, I say. Maybe we could just not do anything and just come here. He shakes his head. That won’t do. No, we’re going to do something. He stares at the iced coffee he ordered. He used to drink “a million” cups a day, but lately, since he turned 31, he finds that it’s making him crazy. “Yeah,” he says, “if I have a little bit too much, I’ll suddenly think the trapdoor in the bottom of my life is falling.” Plus, too much coffee is like truth serum for him (hey, what if we did truth serum?), but he still loves coffee. So far he’s had maybe one and a half fingers of a regular-size cup. He puts his fist up to his heart. “I already feel like I had a speedball.” He lets out a kind of cackling laugh after he says this—head back, launching upward—but it comes out almost like a moon-howl. He laughs like this after almost everything he says, which is an intense way to communicate. When he talks, he tugs on the chest hair near his clavicle so that the bits of skin attached to each follicle pull up and form a miniature mountain range. We sit perpendicular to each other, and he keeps on his Helmut Lang sunglasses. Sometimes he looks at me, but mostly he looks at his scramble and at his dog, Solo, whom he has brought along—he shares the dog with his romantic partner, the experimental British musician FKA Twigs—and who has a Mohawk. "I can commit so wholeheartedly because I think it’s so stressful being in a thing where you’re just constantly second-guessing everything all the time.” Okay, so a fecal transplant. Check. A doctor will creep his (or her!) way into our colons and replace our poop with each other’s poop. Why not? What do we have to risk, other than infection and death?

So it’s settled, I say. I am game for it. I was game for all the others, too, because this is exciting for me, for someone to be as into this as much as I am. Maybe he wants to do something he’s never done before, or see something he’s never seen before, or be someone he’s never been before. It seems like this is the only criterion for how he wants to spend our time, just as it seems to be the only common denominator among the movies he chooses to make now: It has to be something new. It has to deliver a real connection. It has to teach him something about himself and test him. His new movie—his first starring role in years, made by a pair of gifted young brothers named Ben and Josh Safdie—is definitely a test. It’s called Good Time, and it is a locomotive that will grab you by the chest hairs near your clavicle for 100 minutes; Pattinson classifies it as the “panic genre.” He plays a desperate low-level con artist in Queens trying to protect his little brother after a bank robbery gone wrong. Without giving too much away, let’s just say it’s intoxicating to watch someone never slow down over the course of 24 hours and not once in that time make a good decision. Yes, the new Rob Pattinson is defined by his willingness to go berserk or go home. But maybe it’s just on-screen. Already Pattinson is reconsidering the fecal matter. Fecal transplants probably aren’t something that can be arranged in a day, even when you’re Rob Pattinson. Probably you need a diagnosis code or something. They probably aren’t as easily accessible as a colonic, and at this point who hasn’t done a colonic with a journalist? Anyway, he adds, maybe with some menace, “if we did a swap, I don’t know if you’d be able to handle my shit.” As we continue to discuss ideas for our big something, I bat away my thought about what these ideas also have in common, which is that they all render me incapacitated, unable to ask him any questions, and him unable to answer any. We’d be in different rooms, or on a hallucinogen, or in the belly of a shark, or in surgery, for Chrissake. But no, it couldn’t be that. It has to be this: That after years of playing dead, Rob Pattinson feels alive again. Yes, that has to be it.

He spent his formative acting years suspended in Twilight, playing a vampire who mostly just stood there, brooding—an inert emo-reactor to his cis-mortal heroine, played by Kristen Stewart. If you’ve never heard of it, because you were in an underground prison with no access to the outside world, or even other prisoners, a brief recap: It’s about two co-dependent teenagers (one of whom has been a teenager for 100 years) in a super-toxic relationship that unfolds over five movies in the small town of Forks. The blood of this lonely, virginal teenage girl gives off a scent that is like heroin to this teenage vampire who lives there, meaning he wants to eat her but also that he wants to love her. By the end of the third movie, they still haven’t slept together. Finally, in movie four, the two have sex, which they feared might kill her. But she then immediately becomes pregnant, and that actually does kill her. What is the opposite of subtext? Did I mention the town where this takes place is called Forks? “When I find someone who I have an instinct about, I find it quite easy to completely give myself to that person.” When the cameras stopped rolling, Pattinson was surrounded by oceans of admirers who made his world small and paranoid. So you can maybe understand why, freed up by all of those coffins full of Twilight residuals, Pattinson is now doing what he’s always wanted to do: making movies that are relentless and dark and kinetic and subversive. He could’ve gone a lot of different ways after Twilight; the world loves a pallid British super-villain. But it would’ve been more standing still: the CGI, the green screens, the waiting around in his trailer. Plus, he says, “I think you have to have a specific type of confidence to be in those movies.” He was confident he didn’t. He couldn’t just stand there and be defiant, the way villains do. He couldn’t stay on one note and mean it.

Instead, he plunged himself into a series of gritty art-house movies, which, of course, is a strategy favored by just about every teen idol trying to go legit. But this is different in that he doesn’t appear to be picking these projects with a calculated eye toward prestige, or even edge. His recent films are unified primarily by the fact that they feature directors who are great and mostly unheralded, and characters who are a little scary to play. Hardly anyone saw any of these movies, and he says he never expected them to. The point wasn’t for people to see the movies. And so far, he’s been right nearly every time. So far, it appears that Rob Pattinson has killer taste. Cosmopolis, his first post-Twilight movie, gave him the chance to work with his lifelong hero and favorite director, David Cronenberg, and to try his hand at (a very dark sort of) comedy. His character, a nihilist finance bro in the age of Occupy Wall Street, sits in the back of a limo for the duration of the film. He loved Cronenberg. He loved working for his hero. But still, there wasn’t a lot of movement. Edward Cullen’s most notable attribute, besides his looks—powdered face, strong lip, clenched jaw, which would slice through his hand if he rested it there—was his stillness. After that, he wanted some motion. He wanted to floor it. He started noticing how supporting roles got to be wilder and more eccentric, how they weren’t subject to the stolid requirements of a leading man, so he went and did a bunch of those— The Rover, Queen of the Desert, The Lost City of Z —much smaller films that allowed him to move, tinker, alter his appearance. You could watch The Rover, a brutal Australian-made post-apocalyptic heist-revenge tale, without realizing until the credits roll that you’ve been watching Rob Pattinson the whole time. “Yeah?” he asks happily when I say this to him. He loves that. Hearing that is the best thing he could hear. Next up: a project with the visually sumptuous French filmmaker Claire Denis, someone he’s been wanting to work with forever. “It’s a lot about sexual fantasy,” he tells me, “and how your past intermingles, and this thing about kind of having your semen stolen from you in a spaceship and like forcibly impregnating people.” Look for it in theaters soon!

Pattinson came across the Safdie brothers in his endless reading. What caught his eye was a single still image from the last movie they directed, a much admired 2014 heroin-junkie drama called Heaven Knows What: It was a close-up of the film’s star, Arielle Holmes—stringy-haired and staring warily beneath a hot pink filter—whom the Safdies met one day in Manhattan’s Diamond District and decided to make a movie about. When Pattinson first saw the image, on a film-geek website, the movie wasn’t even out yet. But he couldn’t look away. He reached out to them immediately with a blind note saying he was a huge fan and that he wanted to be in their next project. Just to reiterate: He hadn’t even seen the movie yet. But he didn’t care. He was hooked. “I want to disappear into a role,” he told them. Good Time did not exist in any form until Pattinson reached out. The Safdies were in the middle of another movie when they got Pattinson’s note, but they invited him to talk and showed him the finished version of Heaven Knows What. “He said he just wanted to be part of that energy,” Josh Safdie told me. “Rob is constantly overturning rocks to see if he can find a worm to eat. He is genuinely interested in discovering things.” To prepare for Good Time, Pattinson spent weeks in New York just walking around Queens, asking friends of the Safdie brothers to read the lines from his script back to him until he got the accent right. He read The Executioner’s Song and In the Belly of the Beast because Josh mentioned them in passing. He lost weight, dyed his hair blond, got two actual earrings (he didn’t realize the holes never go away), and began to creep into the role of Connie, a petty criminal with dubious morals, redeemed only by his devotion to his intellectually disabled brother. One day, Pattinson and Ben Safdie, who plays the brother, went into a Dunkin’ Donuts in Yonkers, and Ben tried ordering coffee in character, getting more and more agitated, just as his character would. Pattinson, in character as well, tried not so gently to subdue him. “When I find someone who I have an instinct about,” Pattinson says, “who’s going to just push forward, I find it quite easy to completely give myself to that person. And I can commit so wholeheartedly because I think it’s so stressful being in a thing where you’re just constantly second-guessing everything all the time.” On the other hand, now that he’s the star, now that the movies are so much smaller than the franchise machines that run on their own power, like Twilight, he has a new set of responsibilities. He knows a movie like Good Time would not be the subject of much mainstream attention—remember, it probably wouldn’t even exist—without his name on it. He knows that he has reached the stage of his career where he can use his immense fame to bring attention to a very worthy, very difficult movie like this one. But now, sitting here, he realizes he doesn’t really know what to say to me about it. He doesn’t love this part, the selling part, and he’s struggling for the right words. “I’m not very good at sending a message,” he tells me. This is Rob Pattinson’s conundrum in 2017. He can disappear into roles. He can become someone new. But when he shows up to talk about the career he has now, the career of his dreams, people still mistake him for the tabloid tween sensation he was a few years ago, whose personal life was everywhere, who knew he was going to get asked about it in every interview and hated every second of it. He still does, which is why every minute we’re together I see him watching me warily, waiting for me to pounce.

Pattinson was cast in Twilight when he was 21, and throughout his four-year run, he and his co-stars would get dragged to shopping malls to do promotion. Those were the days when he spoke freely. Nervous girls would ask him everything from when Edward and Bella were finally going to bone to how he styled his hair. He told them, “I have 12-year-old virgins lick it.” He was hooded and dragged off to media training by studio executives, and from then on, in any interview he did, he was surrounded by several anxious publicists ready to tase him if he got out of line again. The paparazzi descended upon him in a way we hadn’t seen since Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were a thing. (They were once a thing!) Tabloids camped outside his home. “People were like, ‘It’s fine, who cares?’ ” he says now. “ ‘They’re just photos or whatever.’ They’ll say, ‘Just live your life.’ But that’s not life for me, if someone’s observing it.” During the height of the Twilight madness, he had each of his friends call Ubers while he traded outfits with them in the restaurant bathroom, so that photographers wouldn’t know which car he got into, and then he sent all the Ubers in different directions, because drop dead. He rode around in the trunks of cars “constantly,” he says, because fuck you. At one point he had five rental cars and kept them, along with a change of clothes, in parking lots around town. If he was being followed, he’d dip into one of the lots, switch his clothing and his car, and leave. One day, coming home from Venice, he realized he was being tailed. He drove around for hours because he didn’t want anyone to know where his new house was. Finally, as the sun came up, he pulled over and got out of the car and approached one of the photographers. “You’ve gotten your pictures,” he said. “Can I please just go home now?” “No,” the guy told him. “My boss says I can’t come back until I know where your new house is. Sorry, man.” Pattinson never tried to negotiate or appeal to their humanity again. “There are ways to disappear, like, fairly easily,” he tells me. “It just involves effort, and most people can’t be bothered to put the effort in.” Finally, he won. And he didn’t win because tabloids changed or because Twilight ended or even because he and Kristen Stewart broke up, a breakup instigated, of course, by the very paparazzi they had worked so hard to dodge (look it up). No, he won because he had more money than they did: They simply couldn’t afford the gas and unbillable hours that led to no billable shot. “As soon as I saw a tail, I would just disappear again. It worked after a while. They’re just like, ‘Oh, the guy is just a hassle.’ ” He had cracked the code; he was free. “There are ways to disappear, like, fairly easily,” he tells me. “But you have to be living a quite strange life. It just involves effort, and most people can’t really be bothered to put the effort in.” Things are easier now; not perfect, but easier. Just yesterday he was walking Solo—his girlfriend named the dog—and he saw a photographer, and he hid his face and then was angry at himself, because he knows that hiding your face is a story. As he tells me about it, he tightens that jaw that jaw that jaw, which you could luge down, but then he relaxes and remembers what it used to be like. Put it this way: He was walking his dog outside. He thinks Instagram has taken the heat off of him; it’s taken some of the fire out of the tabloids’ pursuit of movie stars. Now they chase the Insta-models and reality stars. Sometimes they chase one another. But he has no animosity for any of them, he says. “They’re just losers trying to do their jobs.”

What he is trying to say is—no offense to me personally, of course—he would rather not be here. “It’s technically part of my job, but I’ve never been very good at it,” he says. And anyway, “I’ve never been that concerned if someone sees the movie,” which he knows you’re not supposed to say aloud and maybe doesn’t entirely mean, but there you go. His eyes briefly shift toward me with suspicion. He’s sure this is what I’m after—something incendiary, maybe even something about his ex-girlfriend, or something about Twigs. (He only accidentally lets me know he calls her that—Twigs—twice: once in relation to who named the dog they both own and also in relation to the ugliness they both experienced when their relationship became public and people on Twitter spewed racist garbage about her.) In fact, Pattinson tells me, he went to therapy a few years ago during a low time, and the therapist often remarked how good he was at talking without saying anything. Now he applies this skill whenever he’s forced to hang out with people like me. “If I could stay silent,” he says, “I would.” He’s convinced that I’ll take whatever I learn and make his loved ones’ lives a hellscape. Back in the Twilight days, someone Googled his sisters’ names and started hounding them at work. He realized that he should never say anyone’s name—not his ex’s name, not Twigs’s name. (Just watch this. Me: “Are you getting married?” Him: “Eh...,” then laughs.) He tries to make a point in interviews of saying nothing that isn’t already known: “I always think the risk reward is very much weighted in the wrong direction.”

But it’s not just his personal life that he refuses to dive into. He’s also alarmed by the prospect that if he says the wrong thing about a film he’s trying to promote, it could be a disaster. “We live in very sensitive times,” he says. One false move, he says, and it becomes the story of the movie, undoing a lot of good people’s hard work. I surmise, but he will not confirm, that he is referring to several bits in the movie that might go over some p.c. line that the Internet has drawn. I ask him to give me an example—one example—of a movie where this happened, where a single remark or bit of gossip derailed the whole thing. He looks at me searchingly, shaking his head. He doesn’t want to name anything because he assumes that will get him into trouble, too, shitting on someone else’s movie. But I sit quietly and wait. I can wait all day. Finally, he’s got one. “Like Waterworld, for instance.” I look up from my notebook and squint. The Kevin Costner movie? “It’s one of the greatest movies ever made,” he continues, “and everyone said it was bad. And for years everyone was like, ‘This is a terrible movie.’ And now people are watching it and the veil is being taken away.” I am momentarily speechless. Then I confirm whether he’s actually seen Waterworld. He has. Later, I will check to make sure there isn’t a Sidney Lumet movie that’s also called Waterworld. There isn’t. Already he regrets saying this, invoking his beloved Waterworld. He looks down at the coffee. He gets a far-off look in his eyes, staring straight ahead, over my shoulder, at the restaurant wall. He looks at me again and pushes out a micro-sigh. He tells me a story about filming The Rover in 2014, in a town in Australia with a population of 90, several hours north of Adelaide. He could stand out in the open desert, taking a piss. “I know no one can see this,” he thought then. He could barely get his head around it. Just four years earlier, he was filming a movie in Central Park, and 3,000 people came out to watch. For anyone else it would be just a regular piss. For Pattinson, it was the urination of liberation.

So after all that, we end up playing golf, something he’s never done before and I’ve only done for other articles. It was his suggestion, as out of nowhere as the others. It stuck simply because it was the last thing he thought of before there was no time to think of anything else, so we got ourselves a last-minute tee time. He shows up this time in a gingham shirt, unbuttoned to just below the thorax, a baseball cap, and sneakers. He is less anxious than yesterday; he is happier when he is moving. Calmer, too. We rent a golf cart and make it through exactly one hole before it becomes clear that the combination of our ineptitude at golf and cackle-moon-howl laughter does not jibe well with the foul humor of the Angelenos who are available to play golf on a Friday afternoon at 3:12—a time that is called the Twilight slot, if you can believe it. We do not know quite where to put our tees. We do not know where we should be aiming our balls. There are people behind us and people in front of us, and perhaps we hadn’t considered how very, very seriously other people take golf. We decide to bail. I get into the golf cart with him, and he has to drive backward in order for us to make our escape. He does it at full speed, swerving in reverse with the confidence of a man who has been chased down by innocent-looking Priuses with devious-looking photographers hanging out the driver’s-side window. “We are going really fast,” I say.

He turns briefly toward me and gives me a funny look. “No, we’re not.” I was right all along, you know. Sure, yes, all the activities he suggested were about doing something cool he’d never done before, but mostly they were about not talking. Maybe I was being naive, but you have to know I go into each one of these with a heart clouded by optimism and a willingness to believe the best in everyone. He is searching for something new in his work and in his life—that’s all real. But his ulterior motive became unavoidable after we played one hole of golf. You try asking a question with a tape recorder jammed under your bra strap and your notepad under your armpit so that you can hit a ball nowhere near the hole.

“I want to be misunderstood. People are always changing, and the more you put something down in print, people form opinions and they’re constantly creating who they think you are.” After we return the cart, Pattinson and I hit the restaurant in the clubhouse. We sit with beers served in glasses the size of fishbowls and eat hot dogs (ketchup and mustard). I try again for even one iota of intimate conversation. But he just asks me why he would ever answer. So I think back on all the interviews I’ve done, and I tell him very honestly that I think it’s because people want to be heard. Most of us, even the most famous of us—sometimes especially the most famous of us—want to be understood. “I don’t,” he says. “I want to be misunderstood. People are always changing, and the more you put something down in print, people form opinions and they’re constantly creating who they think you are. If you do something that contradicts that, or if you do something which goes out of that box, then you can look like a liar or something like that.” He prefers to stay nimble, you see. There will be less to combat later if someone like me can’t throw his words in his face. It’s just not worth it, he says. Especially now. Especially now that he’s finally back among the living. Living is picking the movies you want, reacting to the world as it comes. Living is walking your dog. That’s why he isn’t giving me shit, he tells me. He hopes I understand. It’s for the best, he says. He’s alive again. Finally he’s alive again. Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a GQ correspondent. This story originally appeared in the September 2017 issue with the title "The Second Coming of Robert Pattinson."