Dashing as he may seem, Mickey 17 star Robert Pattinson insists he’s rather accident-prone. As we speak to him from Boston, on the set of his upcoming film The Drama, he notes that he can’t move his neck because of a recent workout injury.
“I don’t understand why my neck hurts because I was doing a leg exercise,” he says, adding that on the set of 2022’s The Batman, he was constantly getting hurt: “I tried to make it look pretty solid but it became a disaster.”
Mickey 17, director Bong Joon Ho’s follow-up to the triumph of his 2019 film Parasite, is the story of a man named Mickey Barnes — played by Pattinson — selected to perform unpleasant tasks on the alien planet of Niflheim. He dies in a series of mishaps, and is brought back again and again through a process called “reprinting.”
Pattinson says constant accidents came naturally.
“I was quite comfortable with stunts in Mickey 17 because I could look bad while falling over,” he explains. “For some reason, that’s the one benefit of being quite malcoordinated. Somehow I don’t really hurt myself that much from just falling. … I think falling down is my safe space.”
Pattinson has a very British, self-deprecating sense of humor: He set off a fandom freakout when he offhandedly told GQ in 2020, before The Batman was released, that he wasn’t really working out much for the role. He clarified to MovieMaker, the next year, “You’re playing Batman. You have to work out,” but explained that he didn’t get into details about his fitness regimen with GQ because, well, “it’s really embarrassing to talk about how you’re working out.”
So take Pattinson’s claim of clumsiness with a grain of salt, and appreciation for his dry wit. But it’s also true that making movies almost always involves things going wrong, then getting better.
And when Bong Joon Ho is involved, they often turn out great.
The South Korean director immediately related to Mickey7, the bestselling Edward Ashton novel upon which Mickey 17 is based.
“Mickey7 is about a person who’s in the predicament of constantly dying. He goes through this grueling, horrifying process again and again. And I kind of felt like that was similar to my predicament as a filmmaker,” Bong says.
“Obviously, this is not a theme that is outright blatant in the film, but I identified with this predicament a little bit because every time I create a film, of course, I don’t literally die, but I do grind my body, heart and soul into making the film. Sometimes it feels like I die and I’m reborn every time I make a film.”
Parasite arrived in 2019, a year when the film industry was thriving, and suggested limitless possibilities for Bong and cinema in general: A thriller with elements of comedy, sci-fi, and horror, it also offered a provocative, complex commentary on class. It not only earned more than $260 million worldwide, but earned about a fifth of that take in the United States, known for audiences averse to subtitles. And it earned Oscars for Best International Feature Film, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture. It was a movie that could do it all.
In some ways, one might expect Mickey 17 to be even more successful. Though Bong urged audiences in one of his Parasite acceptance speeches to “overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles,” he has made Mickey 17 more accessible to American moviegoers by making it in English, and has cast one of the world’s biggest movie stars in the lead role.
But 2025 is not 2019. Covid and strikes have ravaged the industry. Many movies with blockbuster budgets have fallen in the last year.
The industry is ready for a rebirth. Or maybe several.
But however Mickey 17 fares, Pattinson loved the process of making it. Even the falls.
“Bong made it seem really simple and fun,” he says. “It was one of the most enjoyable jobs I’ve ever gone on because I was literally just doing stuff to make him laugh most of the time. I just acted like a jester, trusting that Bong’s steering the ship in the right direction.”
A Bong Joon Ho Milestone
This marks 25 years since Bong’s 2000 debut Barking Dogs Never Bite, which first played for international audiences at the Slamdance Film Festival, where it won the Excellence in Editing Award.
“I’m always a bit embarrassed when I think about Barking Dogs Never Bite,” Bong laughs.
“Of course, I poured my heart and soul into creating this film, but when I look back on it, the film’s a bit clumsy and I feel like it was during my transition into becoming a professional film director. I see a lot of holes in it, which is why it’s quite different from my films that came after.”
He shares Pattinson’s knack for self-effacement: The project was a success, and sparked one of the best film careers of this century. Bong followed it with 2003’s Memories of Murder, a social-satire and thriller about a criminal investigation, and 2006’s The Host, about a monster created by an American scientist’s carelessness.
At the time of its release, The Host was known for what was then a massive budget for a Korean film — around $11 million dollars. Mother, a whodunnit, followed in 2009. Bong adapted 2013’s Snowpiercer, his English-language debut, from the graphic novel Le Transperceneige, a sci-fi story about climate change. His Okja, an original tale about a super pig on the run from a ruthless CEO, debuted in theaters and on Netflix in 2017.
But the biggest success by far was Parasite, about a rich family and the poor family who infiltrate their household. The accolades for the film began with the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or in 2019 and culminated in the four Oscar wins.
Pattinson says he was “a bit late on Bong” — the first of the director’s films he saw was Snowpiercer, and he loved Parasite.
“After I saw Parasite, I started watching his old movies, and Memories of Murder was the one where the tone of the performances really appealed to my sense of humor,” says Pattinson. “There’s something surreal to their performances. It doesn’t seem very self-conscious. It’s very unique to Bong.”
Ashton, meanwhile, was a longtime fan who calls Snowpierecer “brilliant” and Okja “an underrated masterpiece.” The author, whose books include The Fourth Consort, Mal Goes to War and Antimatter Blues, was delighted when Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B, acquired Mickey7 and gave it to Bong before it was published in 2022.
“People often ask authors if they’re nervous about what Hollywood will do to their work,” Ashton says. “I think that’s a legitimate question to ask. But with Director Bong in charge of Mickey 17, I never had a moment of nervousness.”
On the contrary (and brace yourself for more self-deprecation): “I have sometimes woken up in the night wondering if I’m going to be remembered as the man who destroyed Bong Joon Ho’s career. I don’t think that’s going to be the case, but I never worried that he was going to hurt mine.”
Robert Pattinson on the Expendability of Mickey
Nothing in Mickey 17 is blatant — Bong’s films thrill in part because they so skillfully comingle genre, philosophy and charm. Butyou could read the film as a protest against the cheapening of life, work and art.
“They’re just printing people as if they’re a piece of paper that you can reproduce from a printer,” says Bong. “That concept in itself feels disrespectful to humanity and ruins the dignity that humans have.”
“Yeah, and Mickey’s printed out of shit,” notes Pattinson.
Mickey is an “expendable”: a person seen as so lowly that he volunteers to repeatedly die in experiments that test the human body’s ability to handle life on Niflheim.
After every death, Mickey is reprinted using leftover junk so the process can start all over again. That is, until Mickey takes his 17th mission.
Everyone assumes he dies. But he miraculously finds his way back to base camp — where he discovers a new reprint, Mickey 18, has moved in with his girlfriend Nasha (played by Naomi Ackie).
Soon Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 team up to stop their expedition leaders (played by Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette) from destroying one of Niflheim’s native species.
“Mickey 17 has a total lack of self-worth,” says Pattinson. “Like, why would he continuously put himself up for this stuff?
“But then he also has an attitude which contradicts it. He wasn’t unhappy with continuously going into the flames again and again and again. At least he didn’t appear to be. Especially when Mickey 18 comes into the fray and doesn’t understand 17’s attitude at all.”
Pattinson says he tapped into the character by focusing on his own “misplaced guilt.”
“It’s a very obscure character key for a big sci-fi movie,” he laughs. “I wrapped up in his strange trauma response to this bad thing that happened to him. Mickey thinks he sinned once and because of it his life is shit, so he has to spend his life atoning for it.”
Pattinson adds: “I just have a very guilty conscience. I feel guilty for things that don’t really make any sense a lot of the time.”
Bong changed the title from Mickey7 to Mickey 17 — and added many more dead Mickeys — to try to make the story more cinematic.
“Everything started with my respect for the original material. The novel is very much about Mickey Barnes, this character fated with this unique job to die,” says Bong. “I really wanted to preserve this character and follow his journey.”
Ashton loved the changes.
“There’s a three-page conversation in the book between two characters, and Director Bong accomplished the exact same thing and made the same plot points… but with a fistfight,” the author says. “They arrive at the same place, but get there by a physical fight instead of a conversation. That particular scene jumped out at me because, in a film, you have to be kinetic. Things have to be visual. They have to move.”
But Bong still feels a close connection to Mickey7.
“When I read the novel, I had also created seven films, because Parasite was my seventh movie,” says Bong. “So it was this strange identification I had with Mickey.”
Human Printing
Visiting the Mickey 17 set, Ashton was struck by the occasional tedium and discomfort of trying to make something great.
“When I was on set, Robert was in a very cold room, wearing a very thin skin suit. He seemed pretty uncomfortable at the time,” says Ashton. “They made him lie in the human printer for hours where they filmed him from different angles in this tube. I imagine it was a grueling thing for him.”
But the film was also an exhilarating creative exercise: Bong and Pattinson ran through moviemaking history as they used every technology they could think of in order to allow Pattinson to play Mickeys 17 and 18 in scenes together.
“We used classic methods like using a split screen and compositing, to using body doubles, and using VFX for face and head replacement,” Bong says. “Anything we could get our hands on we used.
“If I were talking to a regular newspaper outlet, I would just say that Rob actually has a secret twin and I made him come out into the world and make his screen debut. That’s honestly what I want the audience to believe.”
Pattinson says he would switch constantly between playing the two Mickeys.
“We’d shoot a line from one character, and then I’d be shooting a reaction to something I hadn’t actually done yet,” he says.
“It’s really unusual, but I think the only way it can work is to be with someone like Bong, who’s just so confident in what he wants and incredibly specific in what he’s asking you to achieve.”
Mickey 17 and Creepers
But Mickey 17 isn’t just about respect for human life.
In Ashton’s novel, Niflheim is inhabited by grotesque insects called Creepers that look something like centipedes. And some characters in Mickey 17 also see them as repulsive.
But not Bong.
“I wanted to create a creature that’s not just a spectacle in the film but a graceful group of characters with their own storyline and dignity,” he says.
The Creepers are his third VFX “creature babies,” he explains. The first was the monster in The Host, and the second was the super pig in Okja. All three creatures were brought to life by Bong’s longtime creature design partner, Jang Hee Chul.
“If you think about it, the name Creeper itself is a horrible name when they’re actually the native creatures of Niflheim,” Bong explains. “They’re intelligent creatures with grace and dignity who deserve proper communication and conversations with the newly landed humans.”
Pattinson uses words like “undefinable” to define the Creepers — and notes that “you don’t know their motives until you see what they do.”
He adds with a laugh: “I think Bong really relates to the Creepers.”
Mickey 17 will be released only in theaters March 7, from Warner Bros.
Main image: Bong Joon Ho and Robert Pattinson on the set of Mickey 17. Photo by Jonathan Olley, courtesy of Warner Bros.
