Robert Pattinson reveals he based Mickey 17 accent on classic Coen Bros character

The actor said director Bong Joon Ho had referenced ‘Fargo’ as an inspiration

Robert Pattinson has revealed he based the accent for the title character in his new sci-fi comedy Mickey 17 on Steve Buscemi’s character in the Coen Brothers’ 1996 crime drama Fargo.

The 38 year-old Twilight star has earned rave reviews for his performance in the new film from Parasite director Bong Joon Ho.

He plays Mickey Barnes, who agrees to be an “expendable” on a new human colony. Each time he dies during a dangerous space mission he is replaced by a new clone, with the film focusing on his 17th and 18th regenerations.

Speaking at the Berlin Film Festival, Pattinson said he’d only recently come to recognize where he drew inspiration from for one of the character’s distinctive accent.

“I actually think I realized today what I was doing,” Pattinson said, per Variety. “We were doing an interview earlier and Bong said one of the thoughts he was having for 18 was Peter Stormare from Fargo.

“And then I think how that went into my head was to do Steve Buscemi as 17. I kind of did it by accident, but I don’t think I realized that until today. I thought I was doing something else.”

Robert Pattinson at the 'Mickey 17' press conference at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival (AFP via Getty Images)

Given that it has been five years since Bong’s previous film, which won Best Picture at the Oscars, anticipation is understandably high for the follow-up. Early reviews have been glowing.

Anchorman and The Big Short director Adam McKay called the film “hilarious, wild, sometimes genuinely heartbreaking and a perfect allegory for the hellscape stage of capitalism we’re in right now”.

In a five-star review, The Independent critic Clarisse Loughrey called Mickey 17 “an absurdist, anti-capitalist, Trump-mocking masterpiece.”

”Mickey 17 is a sci-fi of the working class, of service corridors by production designer Fiona Crombie and matching jumpsuits by costume designer Catherine George,” writes Loughrey.

“It’s essentially Bong’s take on Alien (1979) – a comedy about how Weyland-Yutani treats people as fodder, only the xenomorph is far friendlier and interested in community solidarity. All those at the top of the food chain are howlingly awful yet, unfortunately for us, plausible. Mark Ruffalo features as former congressman Kenneth Marshall, with his tan, veneers and vulnerability to exploitation by the religious right – yes, he’s obviously Trump, but Ruffalo lends him enough peculiarities that he works both as a satire and a diabolical creation in his own right. The same can be said of Toni Collette’s sauce-obsessed Ylfa, Marshall’s wife.”