Robert Pattinson, the face of Dior Homme’s new fragrance, talks to AnOther about the house of Dior and the filming of The Lighthouse
Paris, France – Robert Pattinson is sitting on a sofa, talking about his favourite scent.
“Weirdly, the only scent [in this fragrance] I knew was bergamot,” he says. “I sniffed it and was like ‘bergamot’ and Francois Demachy, Dior’s perfumer, was like ‘yes!’ Bergamot is one of my favourite scents.”
Dressed casually in a T-shirt and jeans, Pattinson is here to talk about Dior Homme’s new fragrance, of which he is the face. As well as bergamot, this “intensely woody” eau de toilette features Atlas cedar, Haitian vetiver and patchouli heart, in addition to notes of musk – a combination of scents that results in a “virile signature”, according to the house.
As seen below, the campaign for this fragrance comprises a film by The Blaze, the French music and video duo consisting of cousins Guillaume and Jonathan Alric, who guest-edited the Another Man website in September, 2018.
Pattinson has a relationship with Dior which far precedes I’m Your Man, first fronting an ad for the house back in 2013, which was shot by Nan Goldin. On the day we talk, Pattinson will later attend Dior’s Autumn/Winter 2020 menswear show, staged at Place de la Concorde.
“There’s a timelessness to Dior, it feels like it’s going to be around forever, it’s a sort of monument,” Pattinson says. “I don’t know exactly how to define it, especially the difference even in the two designers when I’ve been here. To see the differences with Kim [Jones], it’s wildly different from Kris [Van Assche’s] collections, but they still look very much Dior, it’s interesting.”
The launch of this fragrance comes in the wake of the release of Pattinson’s latest film, The Lighthouse, in which he stars alongside fellow Another Man cover star Willem Dafoe – the movie received an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography.
“It’s about these two blokes who get a job in a remote lighthouse off the coast of Maine in 1880, 1890,” he surmises. “You don’t know who the narrator is out of the two guys, or whose story it’s following; you don’t know whether they’re both going mad or whether the island is this magical island. It’s a kind of study of two guys and what happens in isolation. It’s about drinking extremely heavily and the dangers of that, [as well as the way] people deal with repressed guilt and how that ends up bubbling up from your subconscious.
“Everybody is a massive fan of Willem, he doesn’t have any detractors,” he says of his co-star. “I knew Willem was going to bring an enormous amount of energy and humour to it and you don’t get to do movies where it’s just two guys on the same set just fighting each other – that was fun.”