Playing Batman finally puts the boy from Barnes on the A-list, after years spent sabotaging any hope of mainstream success

At first glance, it looks like a neatly managed movie star career path: the graduation from teen-franchise heart-throb to a starring role in a superhero flick. But Robert Pattinson’s journey from Twilight – which made him, along with co-star and sometime girlfriend Kristen Stewart, one of the most famous people on the planet – to the latest incarnation of the nocturnal vigilante Bruce Wayne in The Batman, has been intriguingly circuitous.

He took a decade-long detour through arthouse and auteur cinema, through offbeat roles – the freaks and weirdos, the feckless and the fundamentally untrustworthy – before he finally circled back, via scene-stealing supporting performances in The King and Tenet, into the kind of lead role which cements an actor’s A-list status. It could be viewed as a risky strategy, but it is one that paid off handsomely. Pattinson, who is now 35, has honed his mercurial talent. He is not just a movie star, he’s a thrillingly unpredictable and daring character actor. And he has nurtured something that is in short supply in his generation of groomed and polished media-savvy contemporaries: a refreshing oddball eccentricity.