A TikTok account of Robert Pattinson deepfakes dancing and performing magic tricks has over a million followers — the actor said that even close friends have believed it's real

• A TikTok account of Robert Pattinson deepfakes has over 1 million followers.
• In a January 19 Evening Standard interview, Pattinson addressed the "bizarre" phenomenon.

Scroll through TikTok, and you might stumble upon the famous face of 36-year-old movie star Robert Pattinson — only this time, he's cast in the supposed role of an aspiring vlogger.

The account @unreal_robert has 1.1 million followers, and since May 2022, it's been home to a surreal archive of absurd deepfakes of the actor. (In a deepfake, the face or body of the person actually in the video has been digitally manipulated to appear to be someone else).

In a video viewed 11.8 million times, Pattinson's likeness sways to zeitgeisty pop in a cooking montage. In a December 28 video, it performs amateur magic with a teddy bear, fire, and a mini Dutch oven. On December 16, fake Pattinson jumps off a couch (in the background) into a cocktail glass (in the foreground) like a millennial discovering Mac's Photo Booth app in 2005.

Through it all, deepfake Pattinson offers up an uncanny valley of a smile.

Despite the real Pattinson having a fear of dancing in public so dire that he described having "one of the biggest panic attacks of my life" on the dancefloor of a party, the account's first video (dated May 6, 2022) shows fake Pattinson bashfully dancing to the Sea Shanty Medley. The video has been viewed more than 33.5 million times.

And while the real Pattinson is rumored to have earned $3 million in 2022 alone for his Batman role, his deepfake lives in a modest apartment, spending the days in pursuit of perfectly smooth transitions in a "my weekend outfits" montage.

Despite the obvious off-ness of the images (like mismatched lighting and pacing) and ample context clues, however, you might be forgiven for mistaking fake Pattinson for the man heading up Dior's Homme fragrance campaign. Apparently, his close friends have been guilty of the same.

"'I know, it's terrifying,'" Pattinson told the Evening Standard of the account on January 19. "The amount of people who know me quite well and will still be like, 'Why are you doing these weird dancing videos on TikTok?' It's really bizarre."

"You just realize that we're two years away from it being indistinguishable from reality," he added. "And what on Earth am I going to do as a job then?'"

TikTok is no stranger to deepfakes; @unreal_robert isn't even the only celebrity deepfake parody account on the app. (See: @deeptomcruise with 5 million followers). In September 2022, a 22-year-old fooled millions into believing he was actually AI, telling Insider it just demonstrates "how little people understand AI and deepfakes in general." As recently as June 2022, social media companies came under pressure from the EU to police digital manipulation like deepfakes on their platforms or face multi-billion dollar fines.

While it seems most viewers are aware that @unreal_robert, which has "parody" listed on its profile, is not, in reality, the same man who portrayed a 19th-century lighthouse keeper who screams at seagulls, the videos still spur occasional confusion from some viewers. Some think it is Pattinson; others assume it's an uncanny lookalike.

Under a video from December 28, 2022, viewers wrote comments such as "wait, so I've been liking these vids and it's not even him" and "it's really him????"

Some comment to alert @unreal_robert he looks like "Edward from Twilight," or suggest he meet Pattinson and get a "photo together."

For the majority of viewers who seem to be in-the-know, some seem to half-hope Pattinson, with his well-documented love of absurdity, could somehow be connected.

"I am convinced this is actually Robert just messing with everyone lol," one viewer commented.

By and large, though, viewers seem to view the account simply as a great and terrible "fever dream." For Pattinson, though, it might skew slightly more into "terrifying."

Pattinson and @unreal_robert did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.