Kristen Stewart: Coming on Strong

Kristen Stewart’s body can tell a million stories. Kinetic, she jiggles, feints, and darts as she talks, hanging back, looking off to the side, signaling resistance, a combative intelligence. “The word I always use for her is vulpine,” says Jake Scott, who recently directed her in Welcome to the Rileys, in which she plays a teenage runaway and lap dancer. “Foxlike. She’s got that way of moving and being that you often find in her performances, a sort of wiliness.”
In other words, Stewart projects the kind of wary, rebellious edge that is so much more typical of her age group—she is 20—than gleeful high spirits, which is probably one reason she is head and shoulders above her peers in Hollywood’s power pyramid, and a director’s darling. Scott heard about her from his friend Sean Penn after Penn cast her as the unmoored daughter of hippie parents in the memorable Into the Wild. “Sean said, ‘You’ve gotta see this kid,’ ” Scott recalls. “ ‘She’s just so alive!’ ” For Bill Condon, currently ensconced in a year’s worth of filming for Breaking Dawn, the two-part finale of the mighty Twilight Saga, “Kristen was at the top of my list of reasons to do this movie.”
On a fall weekend in a quiet, suburban part of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the town where the Breaking Dawn set is located (under much secrecy and heavy confidentiality agreements), Stewart, a sylph in tomboyish jeans and a lumberjack shirt, is moving around the kitchen of a friend’s house, cracking her knuckles as she talks. She gets nervous dealing with the media—TV interviews in particular, she says, make her squirm—and she is sometimes accused of being downbeat and defensive in her public appearances, not least because she rarely smiles. She nurses some bad-girl tics, smoking and littering her conversation with expletives, and maintains an insouciance in the face of her big career. “I choose things that are so overly ambitious, and if I can’t do stuff like that, I don’t want to be doing this,” she says. Scratch the surface, however, and the attitude seems more about the passion and perfectionism she feels about her work than the opposite. “A compulsion absolutely fills you,” she says of finding a good part, and admits that she sometimes has difficulty letting go.
Today she is stoked from having just returned from shooting On the Road with Walter Salles, the masterly Brazilian director of The Motorcycle Diaries and Central Station. She plays a character based on Neal Cassady’s first wife, LuAnne Henderson, opposite Garrett Hedlund and Sam Riley. It was an intense improvisatory experience that left her “crying my head off,” she says. “I didn’t want to leave.” Installing herself in Baton Rouge for the foreseeable future was “like going back to school. . . . Twilight is a different beast.” A massive production planned to the millisecond and freighted with dollar signs waiting to happen, Breaking Dawn brings several years of Stewart’s life to a climax. She feels the weight of portraying Bella Swan, “a character who is embedded in so many people’s psyches at this point. It’s starting to enter my head a lot more than it used to because it’s at the end and it’s come such a long way. I just want the fans of the book to be happy.” She laughs. “I don’t necessarily care about anyone else.”
To a large segment of the population, Stewart may have sprung fully formed onto the screen as an incarnation of their favorite heroine. (At last count, Stephenie Meyer’s books have sold some 100 million copies worldwide.) But, despite her youth, Stewart has made more than 20 films, many of them independent and nearly all of them stellar, and pulled off such pitfall-ridden roles as a teenage rape victim and a girl disabled by neurological illness. She grew up in the Valley, the daughter in a family on the more nuts-and-bolts side of the industry—her mother is a script supervisor, her father a TV producer; her brother is a grip. After being spotted as a child at a school performance, Stewart walked straight onto the A-list, taking her first proper role in 2001’s The Safety of Objects, an adaptation of an A. M. Homes story collection, alongside Glenn Close and Patricia Clarkson, and her second in Panic Room, a virtual two-hander with Jodie Foster. “At that time I just thought it was fun,” she says, grateful that she began her career before adolescent insecurities set in. “I don’t think I would ever have been able to be an actress had I not started at nine years old. I would have been the last person to stand up and say, ‘I’d like to star in the play.’ ”
Some facts about Stewart: Currently on her nightstand are Dave Cullen’s Columbine; Into the Wild author Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, a study of radical Mormonism; and Anna Karenina. On her playlist, the Shins, Broken Bells, and Jenny Lewis, the L.A. musician who puts Stewart in the unusual position of being starstruck herself: “She’s the only person I’ve ever met that I can’t function around.” (Stewart also plays guitar and was thrilled to portray Joan Jett, whom she got to know, in The Runaways.) Her favorite movies are John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, starring Gena Rowlands, and La Vie en Rose, with Marion Cotillard. She loves Jane Fonda in Klute. Her new hobby is cooking, no doubt encouraged by the fact that she lives in a somewhat isolated way: “You build a perimeter of people that are really important to you.” Friends tease her for watching the Food Network with a stern frown of concentration on her face. “I’m such a dork.” (The frown pays off. For lunch, she prepares an elaborate, and delicious, Mexican tortilla soup with numerous condiments, along with pulled-pork sandwiches.) She also likes golf, a sport that has the advantage of involving private membership and small numbers of people over large areas. So far, a regular if interesting young woman. In other ways, not regular at all. If she sees a teenage girl, Stewart will literally duck and cover. “There’s no way to eloquently put this,” she says. “I just can’t go to the mall. It bothers me that I can’t be outside very often. And also to not ever be just ‘some girl’ again. Just being some chick at some place, that’s gone.”
She can pinpoint the week she stopped being “some girl” and entered the land of 24-hour security, lockdowns, and endless speculation about her relationship with her costar-boyfriend Robert Pattinson, which she refuses to discuss. (“It’s not my job.”) She had completed the first Twilight movie, which had not yet been released, and just filmed Welcome to the Rileys in New Orleans, where, she says, “I feel so good walking down the street by myself,” before correcting herself: “At least I used to.” She went back for an extra week of work during editing, and suddenly she couldn’t walk down the street anymore. “It really erupted,” she says. “It was a weird thing to watch.”
Stewart, who is careful never to complain about the mixed blessing of the Twilight phenomenon, is smart enough to understand the nature of her particular celebrity. “Masses of girls identified with Bella in a really profound way, for want of a better word,” she says. “The connection that I’ve seen people have . . . I’ve seen it physically. It’s the characters they’re flipping for.” She also feels the power for good that comes with her influence. “It’s funny when you are endowed not only with public recognition on a fucking seriously vast level, but also money,” she says with endearing earnestness. “Like, funds.” (She was reportedly paid $25 million for the two films of Breaking Dawn, plus a percentage of the gross.) “Anytime I hear that somebody’s really rich, the first question is ‘Do you do anything with it? Or do you, like, chill? You just sit on it?’” She is thinking carefully, strategically, about how best to put her own contribution to use, and has a plan—inspired by her researches for the role of a runaway in the sex trade—to set up a network of halfway houses to help those who want to recover and get back on their feet. “That would be amazing,” she says. “Right now it’s the thing I feel most connected to.”
Stewart carries a lot on her slender shoulders for a young woman barely out of her teens. But her transition to adulthood will be a boon to moviegoers. She herself may doubt that she will eventually be able to move past the Twilight juggernaut—“At this point it seems like ‘We’ll see what the Twilight girl did. Let’s see how she’s trying to be different’ ”—but others disagree, and a generation for whom the tattle about KStew and RPattz is not so compelling and the Twilight movies perhaps a guilty pleasure rather than a fervent passion can look forward to seeing her flex her muscles in adult roles. Her nerviness and cool on-screen are interesting to watch, qualities grown women would like to see their reflection in. “She’s one of the smartest actresses I’ve ever worked with,” says Condon. “Not only does she have astonishing technical ability, she has an incredibly incisive and serious approach to character. She has just unlimited potential.”Vouge Feb 2011

ELLE June 2010

Kristen Stewart has reality fright. On-screen, her unleashed energy captivates and her face offers no unfortunate angles. But off-screen, her discomfort is palpable. In her endearingly unpolished public appearances, she fidgets, scratches, runs her fingers through her hair, and generally bungles her words. Her awkwardness seems to arise from a profound distrust of the media, the limelight, and especially of her considerable recent success as the female lead of the billion-dollar-grossing Twilight movie series. Still, uneasiness this extreme is surprising in an actor, someone who has signed up for a lifetime of being watched.


Then again, extreme also describes the maelstrom into which Stewart and her costars, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, have been thrust. Not since the heyday of the Brat Pack in the 1980s has a constellation of teens incited such hysteria. “It’s a crazy anomaly, this teen-idol phenomenon. I can’t think of any like it since the Beatles,” says David Slade, director of Eclipse, the third installment in The Twilight Saga, which arrives in theaters at the end of this month. “We’d be [shooting] in a remote location, in the middle of a forest,” he continues, “and fans would be at the side of the road with flowers at five in the morning.” Twilight mania is such that even those who haven’t seen the films, in which Stewart plays Bella Swan, the all-too-human love interest to Edward Cullen’s blood-starved teenage vampire (Pattinson), know that “KStew” may or may not be dating “RPattz,” her consumptive-looking, bushy-browed costar.

Stewart arrives in the ornate lobby of California’s Four Seasons Hotel Westlake Village, a venue chosen for its proximity to a middle-class section of the San Fernando Valley where Stewart was raised, the only girl among a bevy of brothers. There’s Cameron, her biological brother, who is 24; Taylor, who is Stewart’s age and was adopted at age 13; and Miles and Obie, friends of Cameron’s “that we’ve like helped along the way,” she says. “I’ve always said I’ve had a bunch of brothers because we have a bunch of boys who are like family.” Cameron is a film grip; her parents, John and Jules, also work in the industry (Mom is a script supervisor, Dad a stage manager).

“It’s insane! Once somebody finds out, you have to get the hell out of wherever you are,” she says emphatically, attempting to convey the madness that has become her life. “People freak out. And the photographers, they’re vicious. They’re mean. They’re like thugs. I don’t even want to drive around by myself anymore. It’s fucking dangerous.” It’s a sweltering late-summer afternoon, and Stewart is dressed entirely in black, from her Joy Division T-shirt to the polish on her short nails—the usual teenage suit of armor. Her hair is also black, dyed and chopped into a retro-modern mullet to play Joan Jett in The Runaways, a film she has just finished shooting. As she talks, her words tumble out in knots; she edits herself, starts over, restates her (often wryly funny) point, so that many times it’s made through the accumulation of half-uttered phrases. She fiddles with the multiple silver rings (including one made from a spoon handle) on her skinny fingers. Throughout the interview, she bounces one knee.

Stewart, who turned 20 in April, has worked consistently for the past decade, often in independent films, but she admits the Twilight frenzy has taken her by surprise. “Somebody knocked on my hotel room door and asked for a light, then said that they were a big fan. I was like, ‘Do you really need me to light your cigarette? How do you know what room I’m in?’ ” She mourns the loss of her privacy. (“I can’t be by myself, and I like being by myself,” she says.) “Who wouldn’t who has a soul?” says Jodie Foster, who starred with an 11-year-old Stewart in Panic Room. “It’s a very different time from when I was growing up. We didn’t have those lenses that were 150 feet long, or maybe we had them, but there was still a real delineation between the public and the private.”

What’s mystifying to Stewart—and likely to anyone with either a shred of empathy or a tendency to clam up in public—is the looking- glass reality in which her manner, rather than eliciting sympathy or mere shrugs, has made her a figure of derision. “I think it’s funny that when I go onstage to accept an award, they think I’m nervous, uncomfortable, and awkward—and I am—but those are bad words for them,” Stewart says. She still frets about her MTV Movie Awards appearance last year, during which she fumbled her award, a carton of golden popcorn (then blurted, “I was just about as awkward as you thought I was going to be. Bye!”). “I fucking flung my award on the stage…and I was like, Everything I just said? Gone. Gone. I might as well have just erased it. And they were like, ‘I love how she goes up there and tries to be so serious. She is so pretentious. Why does she always try to sound so smart when she’s not smart?’ ”

Stewart conveys her star-system discomfort (or maybe tries to deal with it) in ways that tend to be perceived not as self-protective, or even self-expressive, but as rebellious. Especially since her choices often thwart mainstream expectations of young women in Hollywood—particularly one who portrays a character beloved by millions of preteens and their mothers. She attends events in sneakers. She was photographed allegedly puffing from a pipe on her front stoop in broad daylight, and in a bikini with a marijuana leaf decorating each breast. She swears like a trucker, just because. “I have a bit of an authority issue,” Stewart replied when David Letterman asked her, in that now-famous 2008 interview, whether she had “any interest in going beyond high school. Maybe college or something?” Let it be said that she has a loyal cohort who love her for all this, but they’re less vocal than her critics. “[I]f a woman isn’t happy and un-opinionated and long-haired and pretty, then she’s weird and, like, ugly,” she sighs, “And I just don’t get it.”

“Let’s go smoke,” she finally announces. We walk outside to a balcony overlooking a faux waterfall. She removes two cigarettes from a pack of Camel Lights, noting that she doesn’t care if people “go onto the Internet and say I’m ugly.” She minds only when they criticize “the effort I put in.” She lights a cigarette, leans forward, and talks with the forbidding intensity evident in her work. “I hate it when they say I’m ungrateful, and I fucking hate it when they say I don’t give a shit, because nobody cares more than I do. I’m telling you I don’t know anybody who does this that gives a shit more than I do.”

“There’s a threat to her health in the way she works, in that she can’t project feelings she doesn’t feel herself,” Weitz says. “If you shoot a scene in which she has a nervous breakdown, that’s potentially what you’re going to get. I have found myself concerned for her at moments.” During the filming of Twilight, studio executives found themselves concerned about Stewart and Pattinson. “Both of them have the tendency to go deep, to find the emotional core of a scene,” says the first movie’s director, Catherine Hardwicke. “I think the producers were worried—and they were right in some ways— that it was going to be one-note, all brooding, all serious.” At the mention of this, Stewart swings: “Well, they’re thanking their lucky stars now that we were serious about it,” she says. “They wanted us to smile more. They literally just thought it was not light enough, not fun enough, that it wasn’t like a love story. But I’m sorry, when you’re in love with someone, you’re not laughing. Well, maybe you are. But not in this story.”

A recurring theme among the directors of Stewart’s films—a steady stream since an agent spotted her singing “The Dreidel Song” in a school pageant at age eight—is her honesty as a performer, her finely calibrated compass for authenticity. “She has a great bullshit detector,” says Greg Mottola, director of Adventureland. “Kristen has an unflinching sense of truth. She doesn’t lie,” says Mary Stuart Masterson, who directed Stewart in The Cake Eaters. “She has to truly believe what she is doing…which is a great gift but can also feel like a curse, because then the material has to be something you believe in too.” Hardwicke adds: “Kristen especially likes to feel good about her lines, as though it would really come out of her mouth. Respecting that would have me doing quite a bit of rewriting on set.”

Stewart tends to play adolescent women who are independent-minded yet still uncomfortable in their own skin, much like she is. Telegraphing their neuroses is, in fact, her strength as an actor: Her characters can be truly discomfiting to watch. Yet she also projects a riveting precociousness. Anyone who has seen Into the Wild will find it hard to forget a young, gangly Stewart as 16-year-old Tracy Tatro, perched on a bed in white cotton underwear, vulnerable as a colt yet trembling with need, offering herself to Emile Hirsch’s clueless, idealistic Christopher McCandless. “Kristen can express all that longing and desire and anxiety with a look or a smile,” says Jon Kasdan, director of In the Land of Women, in which Stewart portrayed a teenager with a crush on her twenty-something neighbor, played by Adam Brody. “She doesn’t have to say, ‘Oh, I’m so filled with longing’—she can just do it.”

Enter Bella Swan. Bella is the epitome of longing. She is yearning when every other quality has been stripped away. Stewart’s ability to convey this to the near-total exclusion of all other emotions is surely responsible, at least in part, for the immense popularity of the Twilight franchise. The (mostly) female fan base may be pining for Edward Cullen in the wispy form of Robert Pattinson or Jacob Black in the decidedly more buff embodiment of Taylor Lautner, but Bella is the vessel for the audience’s collective desire. Stewart calls Bella “the most sort of undeveloped character I’ve played” and notes, “I had to bring myself to [the part].” But whatever real-life aspects she transferred to Bella, the unsung brilliance of her performance is that she also left her sufficiently skeletal so that viewers can do the same. “I think that’s partly why the movies are the phenomenon that they are, and it feels like she’s not getting a tremendous amount of credit for that,” Kasdan says. “Yes, women love the guy and so forth, but they’re loving him through her.”

A few months later, Stewart and I meet again, this time in the corner booth of a dimly lit hotel restaurant in Hollywood. Again she is dressed all in black—her hooded sweatshirt reads nuns with guns: praise the lord and pass the ammunition—but her hair is lighter and longer, and she seems calmer, not as tightly coiled.

The Twilight pressure is off, for the moment anyway—at least until Eclipse arrives in theaters and inevitably arouses the scary lunacy its predecessors did. This time around, Bella learns “that there are, like, different levels of loving someone,” Stewart says vaguely. Or, as David Slade puts it: “Bella is at the verge of the abyss in this film, and she knows she has to step off.…” Two hours of good, cathartic longing.

But Stewart is looking not so far beyond this month to the fall release of “the coolest movie ever,” Welcome to the Rileys, directed by Jake Scott. She plays a 16-year-old stripper-prostitute, “an open wound” of a girl, as she says, befriended by a middle-aged couple (Melissa Leo and James Gandolfini) grieving the death of their daughter. The premise sounds like indie sap, but it works, and the sparely written script showcases the actors’ talents. Stewart renders her wild, damaged character with a complexity and control not evident in her previous performances. To prepare, she lived on junk food, learned to pole dance, chain-smoked, and stayed up all night. The rough living took its toll: Her legs bloom with bruises and her sallow skin with blemishes, all of them real. It’s difficult to imagine another young actress subordinating her looks so completely to her performance. This may well be the role that loosens the association between Kristen Stewart and Bella Swan, poster child for teenage angst.

For the moment, though, there are plenty who see her as Bella. Preteen girls begin to cluster in the booth across from ours, birds of prey gathering to examine their find. The ecosystem of the restaurant has altered. Stewart knows she’s been sighted. I nab the moment to ask her the question on everyone’s mind: “In real life, would you be Team Edward or Team Jacob?”

“Oh my God, did you seriously just ask that?” She laughs. “Shhhh.” Those buzzwords make her nervous; she’s been mobbed before. “I would never cheapen my relationships by talking about them. People say, ‘Just say who you’re dating. Then people will stop being so ravenous about it.’ It’s like, No they won’t! They’ll ask for specifics.” (A possible clue exists on the Kindle she has brought with her: Among the downloads is Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, the movie version of which Pattinson is filming.)

“I want a cigarette,” Stewart announces. It’s almost a dare. The little girls swarm. She poses for a picture with them. Cigarettes in hand, she slips out the door.