Robert Pattinson Says Racist Trolls Are 'Demons Who Live in Basements'

Robert Pattinson is featured on the cover of the latest NME, where he talks about his experience dealing with Internet trolls and reading nasty, racist comments about himself and fiancée FKA Twigs.

In the interview, Pattinson—who’s starring in the movie Life—says the comments he sees about FKA Twigs are particularly enraging:

“I was talking to my dad about this and I bet him that if he looked up Nelson Mandela’s funeral on YouTube, the first comment would be a racist one. And it was, with like a million upvotes. What I don’t get is why. I think it’s because most normal people are not commenters – I’ve never met anyone who’s left a comment on anything. It’s just demons who live in basements. You have this weird thing where you end up trying to fight against this faceless blob, where the more you hate it, the bigger it gets, because it’s all in your head.”

And yet, Pattinson says he has a bad habit of being a glutton for pain:

Even so, he can’t resist feeding the blob by Googling himself, not out of vanity, but out of a “weird compulsion” to “reinforce my negative opinion of myself. I go through periods where I don’t do it at all and feel glorious! Then I’ll fall back into this pit. It really does affect you, and it all comes from some moron sitting on a comment board. It’s always that person who’s needling away at you, who you either want to destroy, or convince them to love you.”