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Chris Hansen, the subject of Robert Pattinson’s hotly anticipated new thriller, has now seen the film and reached a verdict.
Released on 30 October in the UK, Primetime is a psychological crime thriller based on the making of the hugely popular NBC reality series To Catch a Predator.
Running from 2004 to 2007 and hosted by Hanson, the show conducted sting operations to lure would-be predators to a house where they expect to be meeting with a minor (played by a decoy actor of a legal age) but are instead confronted by Hansen and his camera crew before being arrested by police.
In the series, Pattinson plays Hansen with Skyler Gisondo starring as Dan Plumb, who is hired as one of the show’s decoy actors.
Hansen, 67, has now seen the film, which hit cinemas in the US on 25 September, after declining to watch an early private screening because he did not want to sign the required legal agreement to do so. A source close to the film’s distributor, A24, told Variety that Hansen had been asked to sign an NDA that every preview audience must sign for an unreleased project.
While the TV presenter has teased his opinion previously, he withheld his full review for his Have A Seat podcast, in which he highlighted his biggest issue with the film.
“What bothered me most was that it portrayed me as an aloof, detached father from my sons,” said Hansen, as per The Wrap.
He went on to call those scenes “mean-spirited, untrue, and unworthy of the viewers’ time”.
Elsewhere, Hansen reiterated his previous statements in which he said the film is “completely made up”, adding that he believes it to be “98 per cent pure fiction”.
He called Primetime “so far from reality that it wouldn’t even bother me”, recalling that the director, Lance Oppenheim, had sent him a message to say that the movie was intended as a “love letter”.
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“If that’s a love letter, I’d hate to get a poison pen letter from this director,” said Hansen,
Asked if there was any part of the movie that he did like, Hansen replied: “Not really […] the only thing I liked was the commercial about TruBlu that airs right before the film.”
Hansen bought pre-show ads for his true crime platform TruBlu to screen before cinema screenings of Primetime.
Asked for his opinion of Pattinson’s performance, he gave the Twilight star a subpar grade of “D” despite calling him a “talented actor”.
Speaking about Hansen’s early reaction to film clips, in which he branded the movie an “insult”, Pattinson said he was not surprised by him speaking out.
“He’s a public person,” Pattinson said. “He is also just being asked about it. It’s kind of, I mean, I get it. But I’m surprised about the level of traction that everything gets.
“The fact that people are still discussing the ethics of it, of a 20-year-old TV show, I mean, it’s absolutely insane.”