Robert Pattinson

Pattinson was fifteen when he joined a London theatre club and nineteen when Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire put him in front of a global audience as Cedric Diggory. Twilight followed in 2008 and made him one of the most photographed people alive, in a series that took over three billion dollars and gave him almost no room to act inside it.

His response was one of the most deliberate pivots in modern film. Instead of cashing in, he spent most of a decade making difficult pictures for demanding directors: Cosmopolis, The Rover, The Lost City of Z, Good Time, High Life, The Lighthouse. The through-line is that he is drawn to men who are bad at being people. Connie in Good Time is a small-time criminal whose every decision makes his night worse, played at a pitch of sustained anxiety. His lighthouse keeper is a liar coming apart in a room the size of a shed.

The return to scale worked because he brought the oddness with him. Tenet asks him to be charming and mostly opaque, and he is. The Batman is the strongest modern version of the character precisely because he plays Bruce Wayne as a recluse rather than a playboy, which is a real reading of the material rather than a pose. Mickey 17 continues the pattern. He is now a bankable lead who keeps choosing to be strange, with films that have taken over four and a half billion dollars worldwide.