A night out with Robert Pattison.

WHAT does a newly minted British movie star do when he hits New York?

Love and Pain and the Teenage Vampire Thing (November 2, 2008) He heads straight to Brooklyn to visit Bedford-Stuyvesant, apparently.

“I visited the Marcy projects this afternoon,” said Robert Pattinson, who plays Edward Cullen, the handsome vegetarian vampire in the film Twilight, which opens Nov. 21. “It was great. Nobody noticed me at all.”

Mr. Pattinson, 22, said that visiting the old stamping ground of one of his musical idols, Jay-Z, brought back memories of his own earlier artistic endeavors.

“When I was 14, I fronted a rap trio,” he said late Sunday night at the Stanton Social, a dim, bustling tapas bar on the Lower East Side. Mr. Pattinson said the band was “pretty hard-core for three private school kids from suburban London.” He added, “And my mum’s, like, cramping our style, popping her head in to ask, ‘You boys want a sandwich?’”

Lying low in a hoodie and his ubiquitous black ski cap, Mr. Pattinson might have gone undetected in Brooklyn, but that may not be the case for long.

“In Rome there were absolute mobbings,” said the film’s director, Catherine Hardwicke, who, along with Jamie Marshall — her boyfriend and a producer of “Twilight” — had joined Mr. Pattinson for dinner. Ms. Hardwicke and Mr. Pattinson had just returned from an Italian press tour for the film adaptation of the novel for teenagers, the first in a series that has sold over 10 million copies and counting.

“I don’t know how many girls with braces tried to kiss Rob,” Ms. Hardwicke said.

“They’d ask, and if you said no, they’d kiss you anyway,” said Mr. Pattinson, who is probably best known for his role as ill-fated Cedric Diggory in two Harry Potter films.

After macaroni and cheese and fish tacos, the group ambled over to the low-key Death & Co., a lounge on the Lower East Side, where Ms. Hardwicke sipped a raspberry and soda concoction and sketched Mr. Pattinson and her other tablemates on a napkin.

“One of my favorite parts of making the movie,” she said, “was watching Rob play the music he wrote. He just lets it out, and it breaks your heart.”

Mr. Pattinson, who sings and plays guitar, has two earthy ballads, Never Think and Let Me Sign, featured in Twilight. But criticism brought forth by a Web clip of an unannounced acoustic set at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles last month has turned Mr. Pattinson off making music.

“I was so not ready for the scrutiny,” he said. “I haven’t touched a guitar since. When you know you have to be good every time, you never want to do it again.”

Ms. Hardwicke, who had pushed Mr. Pattinson to include the tracks in the film, said, “Now I feel guilty.” Then she pored over a set of Twilight trading cards. “There’s no director card,” she said, without a trace of regret.

Mr. Pattinson, nursing a whiskey and soda, examined his card. “I don’t think it looks like me at all,” he said, tossing it aside. “There’s just no connection.”

“It’s crazy,” Ms. Hardwicke said. “There are T-shirts, trading cards, a board game. They even sent samples of underwear with Rob’s head on them.”

After a moment of reflection, she added, “I hope they nix those.”