Robert Pattinson said at the Venice Film Festival that he hopes Chris Hansen likes Primetime, after the former To Catch a Predator host criticized the film’s portrayal of him without seeing it. Pattinson’s response came on Saturday, the same day Primetime premiered at the festival.
The film, directed by Lance Oppenheim in his narrative feature debut, is set in the mid-2000s and follows Hansen as the host of Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator. Pattinson said he had watched the show when he was younger and found “something electrifying” in Hansen’s presence, adding that there is a “strange alchemy” to the character that helps explain why people are still talking about the show 20 years later. That is the reason Hansen’s reaction matters now: this is not a distant biopic, but a live dispute over a still-recognizable figure whose image is being reframed on screen.
Hansen has said he declined to sign a standard NDA from A24, which meant he did not see the movie before weighing in. Based on the trailer, he called Pattinson’s version “overly dramatic,” while also saying his family “seem to think it’s a pretty good imitation.” He also questioned Hollywood’s motives in dramatizing the Dateline NBC series about child predators, a show that ended in 2008 after backlash over the methods used to confront suspects. That split — public criticism on one side, family approval on the other — is the sharpest friction inside the story and the one Hansen has not resolved by watching the film himself.
Phoebe Bridgers, who makes her acting debut as a decoy in Primetime, said the filming process was “super intimidating.” She said she initially thought, “No way, dude,” when Oppenheim asked her, before adding that she thought she would “wither with all of these guys” but found the set “just fun and free.” For now, the unanswered question is not whether the film will be noticed — it already has been — but whether Hansen will eventually sign off on seeing it, or keep judging a movie he has only met through a trailer and an NDA dispute.
