Pattinson's Primetime Began With a $40 Hansen Cameo
It started with a $40 Cameo.
Director Lance Oppenheim told Variety in an interview published 25 September 2026 that his wife bought him a short personalised video from television investigator Chris Hansen, the host made famous by NBC Dateline’s sting series “To Catch a Predator” Variety. In the clip Hansen told him to have a seat and congratulated him on the release of “Spermworld,” Oppenheim’s earlier documentary. The moment was small and funny. It stuck.
The timing mattered. Oppenheim said the Cameo arrived in 2024, before he had received a script for “Primetime.” About two weeks later he met Robert Pattinson and showed him the video. Two weeks after that, at Pattinson’s birthday party, Pattinson’s producing partner Brighton McCloskey pointed him toward a script whose cover page read “To Catch a Predator.” Oppenheim said he read it in one sitting in his car at 1:30 in the morning.
That script became “Primetime,” Oppenheim’s narrative feature debut, meaning his first fictional film after documentary work. The A24 drama-thriller is billed as “inspired by true events” and takes its cue from “To Catch a Predator,” in which Hansen confronted men who arrived to meet minors AP. Pattinson plays Hansen, with Merrit Wever and Skyler Gisondo in support, according to Variety’s review coverage, and singer Phoebe Bridgers makes her acting debut alongside Pattinson Variety.
Oppenheim said he was fascinated by how the old television show mixed real danger with carefully constructed scenarios, a tension he described to Reuters before the film’s Venice launch Reuters. He recalled being amazed when he first watched it, comparing Hansen’s clipped one-liners to Tony Montana. To build the character, he said he and Pattinson watched Hansen’s appearance on Theo Von’s podcast, where Hansen was asked how he handles darkness and answered: “I just bury it deep down inside.”
Hansen has not embraced the project. The filmmakers told him the film was “a love letter to Chris Hansen,” he told the Detroit News on 23 September, but he called the way it was made “disingenuous, disrespectful and kind of dirty” Detroit News. He later called the film “identity theft” and said it does not represent what the investigative series was or continues to be USA Today. He once went to A24 to watch the film but left without seeing it after refusing to sign an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement barring discussion of what he saw. Variety reported on 25 September that Hansen has now watched “Primetime” and said he was unhappy with Pattinson’s portrayal Variety.
What makes this stand out is the double arrival. Alongside “Primetime,” Oppenheim and comedian Nathan Fielder unveiled “You Can See Everything,” a nonfiction project centred on Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. It was shot in secret over four years and revealed as a surprise screening at the Telluride Film Festival. For viewers, that means two very different Oppenheim stories landing at once, one scripted and one secretly reported, both built around real-life figures who became television events in their own right.
