What is Mickey Barnes supposed to sound like? He’s part New Yorker, maybe, part beleaguered high-school nerd, part cat trying to get into a room it’s not supposed to be in. The latter comparison feels apt given that Robert Pattinson based the voice of the titular Mickey 17 character in part on Stimpy, the cat from the Ren & Stimpy cartoon. Mickey 17 is Pattinson’s latest vocal experiment and yet another opportunity for the actor to throw himself far from the heartthrob he’s known to be and into territory much weirder and more interesting than his looks alone could ever convince you he is.
Pattinson infuses Mickey 17’s nervous disposition with a voice that wobbles and groans with abject misery, pitching his tone upward so it sounds like a door creaking on its hinges. While many British actors approach the “American accent” as a sweeping attempt to hit all 50 states, Pattinson goes for region (like his “Hahvahd Yahd”–lite New England drawl in The Lighthouse) and specificity (that native New York bite in Good Time), hitting a tone or pitch that echoes a character’s, well, character. He’s gone up higher for other roles before, like his shrill turn as a rotten southern preacher in The Devil All the Time and his sassy French accent in The King. He’s gone lower when playing Batman and for his California drawl in Map to the Stars. He’s put himself through the accent wringer so many times that when he actually does play English — as he did in Tenet and The Lost City of Z — there’s a novelty to his posh affectation, as if perhaps he was making that up the whole time, too.
There are lots of strange actors currently who contort and modulate their bodies and looks by appealing to their distinctive features. Barry Keoghan can change the tenor of a scene just by shifting his shoulders; Rami Malek has built a career on showing up and blinking either too much or too little. We’ve seen physical chameleons gaining and losing weight or piling on a bunch of prosthetics. There are endless ways to change your appearance onscreen, but it’s rarer for a guy to use his own body like a ventriloquist’s dummy. While Pattinson has long worked to shed the pretty-boy type he played in the Twilight films, he has rarely altered his look; sometimes he dyes his hair or has a beard, but you always know when you’re looking at Robert Pattinson. Part of what makes him such an undeniable movie star is that the audience sees him through his characters, whether or not they’re able to hear him. As with Christian Bale, yet another Batman, it’s difficult to remember what he’s actually supposed to sound like, his voice now distorted and amplified across a number of bizarre characters. In interviews, it’s hard to take Pattinson’s real voice seriously: Is that really what he’s supposed to sound like? Or is this just another put-on?
Pattinson’s best and weirdest voice appears in a film in which he’s never physically present onscreen. In the English dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, Pattinson lends the heron an unsavory croak. He is as unrecognizable as an actor could be, disappearing so thoroughly into the part that it’s easy to question if it’s really Pattinson down in that strange bird. The animation puts Pattinson’s physical twitchiness and good looks at a remove; he contorts all that is magnetic about himself as a performer and spits it out through the character’s beak.
In conversation with Bong Joon Ho in GQ, Pattinson told his Mickey 17 director that if he feels he’s repeating himself, he worries a director might find him fake. That same approach, perhaps, explains why Pattinson pushes himself to sound different from role to role. After playing the same character for five Twilight movies in a row, he never wants anyone to know what they’ll see — or hear — next when they look at him on the big screen. That constant state of surprise makes it all the way into the text of Mickey 17. In the near(ish) future of the film, scientists have created a 3-D printer that can make multiple copies of living humans in order to kill and remake and re-kill the same person with the same biology over and over like a guinea pig. Though each Mickey is Mickey, the dynamic that emerges between Mickey 17 and his double, Mickey 18, is that of beta and alpha. If 17’s voice is Stimpy’s, 18’s is “more like Ren,” as Pattinson told Empire. The actor lowers his voice slightly, granting the newer Mickey a more confident, brusque personality. The doubles may look and move the same, but when Mickey 17 looks at Mickey 18, he’s flooded with terror. It’s not that he’s afraid of what he sees but of what he hears. He may know very well what his multiple looks like, but Mickey 17 never knows what the man who looks like him is going to say.
