Robert Pattinson spent the years after Twilight making every choice the Twilight version of fame would have said no to.
Cronenberg. The Safdie Brothers. Claire Denis. Robert Eggers. He sought out directors who were going to make him uncomfortable, and he let them. The filmography he has built since 2012 is one of the stranger actor catalogs in contemporary film, and it happened because he seemed genuinely uninterested in the obvious path.
Good Time is where people started paying attention in a different way. He plays a guy running through Queens at night trying to get his brother out of jail, and the desperation is not something you perform. He is all motion and bad decisions. The Safdie Brothers found something in him that felt real, and it was.
The Lighthouse is where it got harder to categorize. He and Willem Dafoe are two men going slowly insane on a rock in the North Atlantic, and by the end you forget that either of them is acting. Backlot members keep adding it to lists this month.
The Batman came after all of this. He brought the same unsettled quality into a blockbuster and it held. He treats Bruce Wayne like someone who is genuinely not okay, which is more interesting than the version that just punches things.
The Odyssey has him working with Christopher Nolan as Antinous, the villain of one of the oldest stories ever told. Backlot keeps rating it. He keeps picking the right things.
This list is where to start.
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