Robert Pattinson hasn’t exactly tried to run away from his Twilight fame as much as he’s roasted the movie franchise. But one thing he can never outrun is that tracksuit meme.
Robert Pattinson memes: The origin
A photo of Pattinson wearing a brown Adidas tracksuit was posted on Instagram by Josh Safdie, who Pattinson worked with on the movie Good Time, in 2017.
In the image, Pattinson looks surprised and his arms are held unnaturally at his sides. Safdie has since deleted the Instagram post, but X users got their hands on the photo just in time to turn it into a meme.
Peak Usage
Three years after its debut, the photo of Pattinson in a tracksuit bloomed into a meme in 2019 and 2020. The meme represents awkwardness—but the internet also had a great time photoshopping the image of Pattinson into films and contexts he’s never appeared in, too.
“‘Help your cousin get more folding chairs from the garage,’” a tweet including the photo reads. Pattinson is shown as the cousin, awkwardly standing around ready to help.
“‘Hey, my boy over there thinks you’re cute,’” another meme reads. The boy is Pattinson, of course.
Photoshopping craze
There were days in 2020 when you couldn’t scroll X without seeing Pattinson’s taken-by-surprise expression photoshopped into famous scenes from movies and TV shows.
Thanks to creative X users, Pattinson became Sonic the Hedgehog, part of The Avengers, an accomplice of Heath Ledger’s Joker, a character on Glee, a competitor on Squid Game, and many other roles.
One X user said that she photoshopped Pattinson into so many different settings that her phone created a slideshow of Pattinson memes:
The meme as Pattinson
Pattinson in his tracksuit was also photoshopped into scenes from Twilight, making a full circle meme experience for those familiar with his leading role in the Twilight franchise. Sometimes, the meme was put in place of Pattinson’s character Edward, other times Pattinson in his tracksuit popped up in scenes Edward wasn’t even in.
The meme has also been photoshopped into scenes from the Harry Potter movie franchise in which Pattinson’s character, Cedric Diggory, appeared.
