A24 dropped the first trailer for Primetime and I have watched it four times now. Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen, the To Catch a Predator host, and the performance is doing something I did not expect. It is eerie. It is off kilter. Pattinson nails Hansen's cadence so precisely that you have to listen twice before your brain places where you know that voice from. It sits in uncanny valley territory, which for this subject matter is exactly where it should be.
The film is set in 2006, which was the peak year for Hansen's Dateline NBC sting franchise. That year was also when the show effectively ended after a target killed himself as officers and a camera crew entered his home. The show never recovered from that moment, and neither did the conversation around it. Setting the film in that specific window is a deliberate choice. This is not a victory lap for Hansen. This is the story of a media phenomenon eating itself.
Ari Aster's Square Peg is among the producers, which tells you something about the tone they are going for. Aster does not attach himself to straightforward biopics. He gravitates toward stories where the protagonist's confidence becomes their undoing, where moral certainty curdles into something darker. That sensibility fits Hansen's arc perfectly. The man genuinely believed he was doing righteous work, and the show genuinely helped catch predators, but the spectacle of it all was always uncomfortable in ways people chose not to examine too closely.
Pattinson continues to be one of the most interesting actors working right now because he keeps choosing roles that make audiences uneasy. After Twilight he could have coasted on leading man looks for decades. Instead he went to the Safdie brothers for Good Time, where he played a desperate criminal spiraling through one night in Queens. He went to Robert Eggers for The Lighthouse, where he descended into genuine madness opposite Willem Dafoe. He took Batman and made it a detective noir about grief. Every choice since 2017 has been a deliberate step away from comfort, and Hansen fits that pattern perfectly.
If you have not seen Good Time and The Lighthouse, watch both before Primetime comes out. They are the key to understanding what Pattinson does with characters who believe they are in control while everything around them falls apart. That is Chris Hansen's entire story in one sentence. A man who built a career on control, sitting across from people in their worst moments, until the moment the lens turned back on him.
I think this might be the role that gets Pattinson his first Oscar nomination. A24 clearly thinks so too.
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