It’s no secret that it took some persuading to get Robert Pattinson to portray Chris Hansen in Lance Oppenheim‘s Primetime. However, the director is revealing just how he bribed the actor to take on the role.
Pattinson initially joined the film only as a producer, but Oppenheim recently told Vulture that he used Pattinson’s Zyn addiction to help convince him to play the To Catch a Predator host.
“Rob, at the time, was grappling with a Zyn addiction,” the filmmaker said, referring to the nicotine pouch brand. Around that time, there was also a Zyn shortage in the U.S., so Oppenheim came up with the idea to recruit a friend in Canada to send 200 canisters to Pattinson’s Los Angeles home.
Following the special delivery, Oppenheim also dropped off the latest version of the Primetime script with a letter that began, “Dear Chris Han-Zyn.” Pattinson eventually agreed to take on the lead role.
“It was like LeBron [James] making the announcement that he was joining the Heat,” the director added.
Primetime was years in the making, as screenwriter Ajon Singh previously opened up to The Hollywood Reporter about the struggle to get anyone in Hollywood to read his initial script. That was until The Odyssey star got hold of it and wanted to Zoom with Singh.
“They got the script,” Singh recalled of the call with Pattinson and his producing partner Brighton McCloskey. “It was the most validating thing, maybe in my whole career. They were just responding to it specifically and thematically.”
Primetime chronicles the intense production, ethical dilemmas and media sensationalism behind To Catch a Predator, which ran from 2004 to 2007.
Once Oppenheim signed on to direct, he and Singh worked together on a plan, which included rewriting the character of Hansen, to convince Pattinson to take the role. “A big part of those early stages was trying to convince Rob to act in the film instead of solely producing,” Singh told THR.
Despite the actor’s busy schedule, which included shooting Die My Love, The Drama and The Odyssey, Pattinson found the new version of the Primetime character too compelling to resist.
“There was something in the design of the show and the alchemy [of] what Chris Hansen was doing that was creating something entirely unpredictable,” the Twilight alum previously told THR. “I was interested in finding out what that was. As I continued to investigate, I became increasingly interested in playing a character who was trying to figure out what that ineffable alchemy was, in real time, while simultaneously becoming unexpectedly, incredibly famous.”
“I watched a ton of the show, every episode of his podcast, every interview I could find,” Pattinson added. “But I knew from the first read of the script that the character in the movie was going to be a conceptual figure based on the public persona of ‘Chris Hansen’ as he’s been portrayed and perceived across all mediums and internet culture — a reconfigured egregore of sorts.”