At the start of the pandemic, The Batman’s production kept starting and stopping. It took more than a year to complete filming because of all of the lockdowns, quarantines and positive-Covid cases, including Monsieur Batdude himself, Robert Pattinson. Before he caught Covid, Pattinson was just some dude living in a flat with Suki Waterhouse, eating like a feral animal and NOT staying in shape for the movie. That spring, he gave a hilarious interview to GQ where he explained his gross eating habits and talked about how he wasn’t keeping in shape. The studio hired a trainer for him but he was, at the time, “ignoring her.” He told GQ:

“I think if you’re working out all the time, you’re part of the problem,” he says, sighing. By “you” he means other actors. “You set a precedent. No one was doing this in the ’70s. Even James Dean—he wasn’t exactly ripped.” He says that back when he was the star of the Twilight franchise, “the one time they told me to take my shirt off, I think they told me to put it back on again.” But Batman is Batman. Pattinson called another actor on the film, Zoë Kravitz, the other day, and she said she was exercising five days a week during their exile from set. Pattinson, well: “Literally, I’m just barely doing anything,” he says, sighing again.

That admission, while hilarious, went over like a lead balloon with Bat-fans and women and the studio. Even though Pattinson is well-known for saying stupid sh-t and lying his ass off in interviews, this admission FELT truthy. Well, now Pattinson is saying that it was sort of a lie, or just a very English way of trying not to brag:

As is often the case with Pattinson, the actor made a joke with dry humor only for it to get picked up across the internet and social media as fact. Pattinson set the record straight this week in an interview with MovieMaker that he did work out plenty in order to play Reeves’ iteration of Batman.

“That really came back to haunt me,” Pattinson said about the workout joke. “I just always think it’s really embarrassing to talk about how you’re working out. I think it’s like an English thing. Unless you are in the most unbelievable shape, where people are just genuinely curious, going, ‘How have you achieved, like, physical perfection?’ or whatever.”

Pattinson clarified, “You’re playing Batman. You have to work out. I think I was doing the interview when I was in lockdown, as well, in England…I was in a lower gear of working out.”

Pattinson compared the outrage over his “The Batman” workout joke to another bit of interview humor that has since followed him around as fact: “It’s the same thing as saying in an interview when I was like 21 that I didn’t wash my hair. It just sticks for 15 years.”

[From Variety]

Obviously, someone at Warner Bros screamed at him for hours after the GQ interview came out, and I would imagine his director Matt Reeves yelled too. But I found it funny! I still do. Rob was truly like “I’m going to play the Batman as a schlub with a beer gut, AND?” And yes, I’ll buy that it’s “very English” to be embarrassed to talk about workouts.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Instar.