Chris Hansen claims the Robert Pattinson thriller he inspired is ‘completely made-up’
Chris Hansen claims the Robert Pattinson thriller he inspired is ‘completely made-up’
Adam WhiteThu, September 10, 2026 at 8:20 AM UTC
0
The back and forth between the new Robert Pattinson thriller Primetime and the man who inspired it – To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen – has continued, with Hansen dubbing it “a completely made-up work of fiction”.
The movie is inspired by the enormous success of Hansen’s TV series To Catch a Predator, which began in 2004 first as a single segment on the US magazine show Dateline NBC, before being spun off into its own series. The show saw alleged child predators lured into the homes of children they believed they had been communicating with online, unaware that the children in question were actually adult crew members of the series pretending to be underage.
Hansen (who is played by Pattinson in the new film) would famously emerge from the shadows in each home to confront the men who’d been targeted by the show. Men were found with help from the now-defunct watchdog group Perverted-Justice.
Hansen was not asked to be involved in the making of Primetime, and told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview this week that it “seems sneaky and disingenuous”.
Chris Hansen and Robert Pattinson (Getty)
“You look at the trailer, and there’s nothing in it that actually happened in real life,” he said. “That raises the question: Why use somebody’s name, image and likeness? They do that because it has commercial value. The name is a brand, and the brand brings people into theatres, just as it does to my podcasts, my network and everything else we do.”
But Hansen also claimed to not be “obsessed” with the movie, either, as he is largely still focused on paedophile stings. “I’ve got work to do,” he said. “It’s a full-time job being the real Chris Hansen, much less worrying about a fictional movie. We’re not going to be taken advantage of or rolled over. But I don’t spend sleepless hours on it.”
Advertisement
To Catch a Predator proved a controversial sensation while it was on the air, with Hansen becoming an overnight star. But the show was swiftly cancelled in 2008 when a 56-year-old assistant district attorney killed himself in his home shortly after a sting involving a fake child had taken place, with crew members from To Catch a Predator capturing the suicide on camera.
Hansen, who has said he has no intention to ever see Primetime, added that the movie appears “much darker and way more dramatic” than reality, and claimed that it is “an insult to the thousands of men and women who work hard every day to protect children from predators”.
He continued: “They turn something that is very positive, very challenging and not without risk into what is essentially a horror film. I guess it’s not surprising that a Hollywood studio would act in such an exploitative or predatory manner. We’re talking about an industry that was led by perhaps one of the biggest predators to walk the planet, Harvey Weinstein.”
Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen in 'Primetime' (AP)
Appearing ahead of Primetime’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month, Pattinson said he hoped that Hansen, who had previously called the project “disingenuous” and “exploitative,” would eventually see his portrayal as a compliment.
“I mean, obviously I hope he likes the movie,” Pattinson said. “I never really set out to make a movie about Chris Hansen. I would hope in some ways, like, the amount of inspiration that his character has kind of given certain people who are involved in this [film] for like years now, I hope is some kind of compliment.”
Primetime has received early raves from critics, with BBC’s Nicholas Barber dubbing it “intoxicating”, adding: “it’s not a straightforward drama, but a heightened, hallucinatory black comedy. Rather than detailing Hansen's back story or the creation of To Catch a Predator, it drops us into the middle of a fever dream in which everything is wholly believable yet unsettlingly weird.”
Pattinson, meanwhile, has received some of the best reviews of his career to date, with Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri writing that “Pattinson plays [Hansen] like a man whose voice and demeanor could change at will, an ambitious morass of contradictions. It’s a stunning demonstration of the actor’s range, and watching the film you can’t imagine any other performer of his generation pulling it off.”
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
