Robert Pattinson Tried To Invent His Own Pasta And Blew Up A Microwave

"The Batman" is a hit. The film, starring Robert Pattinson, raked in $128.5 million dollars in its opening weekend — the biggest box office debut of the year so far (via Vanity Fair). However, an original pasta creation he called Piccolini Cuscino (Italian for "little pillow") may not have been such a hit. When the movie star first spoke with GQ in 2020 about his pasta endeavor, it was a massive fail. 

In a video call with the GQ journalist, Pattinson attempted to make "a pasta ... you can hold in your hand" with sincere intentions of marketing and selling to the public. After unsuccessful attempts to find an investor who would take him seriously, he had resorted to magazine interviews to sell his idea. "Maybe if I say it in GQ, maybe, like, a partner will just come along," Pattinson revealed.

Apparently the fork needed to eat SpaghettiOs wouldn't be necessary for Pattinson's pasta, which appears to be similar to a sandwich. He began his cooking segment with ingredients bought from the corner store: a lighter, nine packages of sliced cheese, "just any sauce," and "one giant, filthy, dust-covered box of Cornflakes" because the store was out of breadcrumbs. He added some sugar and a "squiggly blob" of pasta to the top of a hamburger bun, then sprinkled some cornflakes, sugar, and cheese on a piece of tin foil. The next step bordered on disaster.

Robert Pattinson continued to prepare the dish by adding sauce atop the cheese, then the microwaved pasta. Next, he added more sugar before topping the entire dish with the other half of the hamburger bun. The actor even burned the initials "PC" for Piccolini Cuscino into the bread. Wrapping the whole dish in more foil, the "Twilight" star made his vital misstep: Mistaking it for an oven, he puts the ball into a microwave. "Oh, oh, oh. A thousand watts, there you go," Pattinson said as he walked away from the appliance. Soon, sparks flew and the microwave cut out with a bang. "Yeah, I think I have to leave that one alone. But this is a Piccolini Cuscino," Pattinson told GQ.

Little did Pattinson know Piccolini Cuscino would soon become a phenomenon, as is evident from a simple Google search for "Robert Pattinson pasta," which results in entries galore about how to make it, and even features on those who have tried to recreate it –- albeit without the microwave incident, hopefully. One writer from The Guardian detailed their experience and gave readers a review of the end result. "If there's one saving grace of the bizarre concoction, it's that the mix of ingredients can only be so disgusting. It's almost impossible to ruin pasta, tomato sauce, bread, and cheese ... But it's not as terrible as I thought it would be. It's edible," they wrote.

But things didn't end there. When GQ interviewed Robert Pattinson again in February 2022, he was asked about the pasta foray and his level of sincerity when it came to both attempting to fashion, prepare, and market the dish. "But I was fully, actually trying to make that pasta. Like I was literally in talks with frozen-food factories, and hoped that the article would be the proof of concept. My manager was like: 'Is this really what you want to do? You want your face on handheld pasta? You know you've got to go to Walmart and really sell it, for potentially very little return.'"

Pattinson laughed off the idea, but not before he had become a meme and pure internet gold. "This was fun to make, but I've never taken so much pleasure in scraping something into the bin," wrote The Guardian experimenter. While the actor still seems open to the pasta he invented, there is a dish Pattinson never wants to see again after his "Batman" diet