Robert Pattinson Has A Colorful Way Of Describing Tenet’s Wild Plot, Including F-Bombs

Robert Pattinson and John David Washington in Tenet
(Image credit: (Warner Bros))

Being confused by Christopher Nolan’s work has been our state of being for quite some time. We’re still trying to recollect the ending of Memento and zone out and think about the ever-spinning top from Inception every so often. According to Robert Pattinson, Tenet is really going to blow our minds too. Here’s how The Batman described the script (without spoilers, of course):

You really think it’s going to be a particular type of genre. Then it expands into something else and you’re like, 'Oh, okay, this is kind of where we’re at.' Then it just completely morphs into an entirely different genre, which is very, very unexpected. My first impression was it seems like the greatest plate-spinning trick you've ever seen. It’s putting another plate spinning and another and another and another to the point where it gets really impressive and then it just sort of gets frightening. It becomes a magic trick, this feat of engineering, the script.

Yeah, that sounds like a Christopher Nolan movie. Robert Pattinson called the upcoming summer blockbuster a “magic trick” that completely surprised him. He teased to Entertainment Weekly how the film plays with a number of genres and takes multiple unexpected turns. From our angle, Tenet is going to be a globe-trotting espionage film, but what else could it be? Nolan has doubled down on explaining that it is not a “time travel film” but it is centered around this concept of time inversion.

Robert Pattinson elaborated on his initial impression of the Tenet script with these words:

When I first read it, I was just kind of amazed by the ingenuity of the writing. Then, just to think, like, how the fuck are they going to make this into an actual movie? Just the basic premise of certain scenes are so complicated to even understand in your mind, the idea of actually shooting them seemed totally impossible. Luckily, I didn’t have to plan it at all. I just had to turn up.

Wow, we cannot wait! Thankfully, Tenet is just one month away from hitting theaters… unless it somehow gets delayed again at the last minute. The studio reportedly wanted to move the film way back, but Christopher Nolan pushed for his movie to be one of the first major releases to hit theaters after months of closures.

Tenet will be mainly about John David Washington’s mysterious character as he gets approached to assist with preventing World War III somehow. Robert Pattinson will be an “important” supporting character who is, according to Christopher Nolan, named Neil, but the writer/director also threw in this shady description about the role:

Or we think may be called Neil. You never really quite know what’s going on with these identities.

Chris Nolan, it’s your character! How don’t you know? Either way, get ready to be confused and intrigued. It’s pretty much what the Interstellar filmmaker does best. Tenet is his most ambitious film yet, taking place in many exotic locations and costing over $200 million to produce. Nolan totally crashed an actual 747 during the making of the film, who knows what else is in store?

Robert Pattinson is gearing up for a heck of a year as a movie star, not only with the release of Tenet, but when he suits back up for The Batman soon in London. The production featuring Zoe Kravitz, Andy Serkis, Paul Dano, Jeffrey Wright and Colin Farrell is getting ready to resume ahead of its fall 2021 release date. Check out Tenet in theaters on July 31.

Sarah El-Mahmoud
Staff Writer

Sarah El-Mahmoud has been with CinemaBlend since 2018 after graduating from Cal State Fullerton with a degree in Journalism. In college, she was the Managing Editor of the award-winning college paper, The Daily Titan, where she specialized in writing/editing long-form features, profiles and arts & entertainment coverage, including her first run-in with movie reporting, with a phone interview with Guillermo del Toro for Best Picture winner, The Shape of Water. Now she's into covering YA television and movies, and plenty of horror. Word webslinger. All her writing should be read in Sarah Connor’s Terminator 2 voice over.