Kristen & Charlize for Interview Magazine July 2012

Interestingly enough, there is one way in which Charlize Theron has less experience than Kristen Stewart. With theTwilight experience behind her—Twilight (2008), New Moon (2009), Eclipse (2010), Breaking Dawn-Part 1 (2011), and this year's Breaking Dawn-Part 2—the 22-year-old Stewart has been at the eye of the major-movie-phenomenon hurricane more times than Theron. For the most part, Theron, 36, has contented herself with pursuing projects that ask questions about the way that women are defined, and the ways in which they often deal with oppression in those roles. Those parts have ranged from her most recent role in Jason Reitman's Young Adult to a spate of dynamic biopics that includes the risky reset of her career in Patty Jenkins'sMonster (2003), which earned her an Oscar for best actress, and Niki Caro's North Country (2005), which earned her a nomination, as well as her turn as Britt Ekland in the 2004 HBO film The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, for which she was nominated for an Emmy for best supporting actress. Even Theron's lead in Karyn Kusama's 2005 action filmAeon Flux involved playing a character that exists simultaneously as a character as well as a commentary on women in genre films.

Stewart's interest in serious acting gives her something in common with Theron—and, like Theron, some of her most provocative work has come through working with women. For Theron it was Monster, by writer-director Jenkins, that marked the turning point. But Stewart's history of teaming with women spans her entire career, and includes her performance at the age of 10 in her first film, Rose Troche'sThe Safety of Objects (2001), as well as costarring with Jodie Foster (who is clearly a role model) in David Fincher's Panic Room (2002), being cast in the first Twilight film, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, and her remarkable turn as trailblazing rocker Joan Jett in Floria Sigismondi's girl-epic indie film The Runaways (2010). Stewart and Jett got to know one another during the filming of The Runaways, and, like Foster, Jett's influence on Stewart is palpable. (Stewart was amused when I told her a story about Paul Schrader's 1987 film Light of Day, in which Jett co-starred with Michael J. Fox; the movie's original title was Born in the USA, which Bruce Springsteen liked so much that he asked Schrader if he could use it, and wrote the director a song as recompense.)

The upcoming Snow White and the Huntsman, an armor-plated retelling of the classic fairy tale interpreted by first-time feature director Rupert Sanders, transforms the apple-blossom character of Snow White into something out of a Robert E. Howard pulp novel, and represents a departure for both Theron and Stewart. Theron says that she was intrigued by the psychological demands of the material in playing the complicated Queen Ravenna, and Stewart's performance as Snow White, the fairest of them all, in her first action-heroine role, kept her literally in constant motion. But both women enjoy being challenged—by work and in conversation. I'm pleased to say that the reward with each—I spoke with them separately; in person with Stewart, and over the phone with Theron—is that they are quick to laugh, which makes talking with them even more pleasant.


*Read More for Interview...*

ELVIS MITCHELL: In looking at the films you've done, one thing that strikes me is that you've worked with a lot of women—and a lot of female directors. 

KRISTEN STEWART: Quite a few, yeah, which is rare. It's hard to generalize about that subject because the women I've worked with have all been so different. But if there's one consistency, it might be that you do have to handle yourself differently on a set. Women can be more emotional—at least they sometimes show it more. 

MITCHELL: In what way?

STEWART: You know, with the film industry crews, there's an odd mix between a very technical and a very artistic approach to the work, and sometimes as a woman you have to be a little bit careful about how things come out because people don't really want to listen if it's in a certain emotional tone or too strong. 

MITCHELL: If it's too directly emotional?

STEWART: Yeah—if it's addressing a direct emotion. I mean, it's this weird thing that I always feel like I have to gauge in myself, like, "Don't come on too strong because you won't get your way." It's like you have to be very tactful in how you get things across. But it's mostly in the group discussions that anything like that comes up. In personal conversations between director and actor, the male directors that I've worked with are just as emotional. Maybe it's because I had to start having very intimate conversations with adult men at a very young age in order to get the work, but I'm really comfortable with dudes. I mean, we push boundaries in this business in terms of getting to know people. There are things that directors know about me that people shouldn't know. But everyone's really different. I've worked with women who I've never wanted to tell anything about myself to, and I've worked with guys who have been pouring wells of emotion. So emotional availability is not a gender-specific thing.

MITCHELL: When was the first time you remember working with a woman who you instantly connected with?

STEWART: Well, Jodie [Foster, who Stewart worked with on David Fincher's Panic Room, 2002]. But actually, the first person who hired me for a movie was a woman: Rose Troche, who directed The Safety of Objects [2001].

MITCHELL: You were a kid when you did that movie.

STEWART: Yeah, I was 10. It was the first part I ever got. I was almost done auditioning at that point. I wasn't getting anything and I figured that it just wasn't worth it. But that was the first time I had an audition where suddenly I felt something. I remember looking up, and there was a camera, because I was being filmed, and I looked over at Rose, and I knew instantly that I had gotten the part without her even saying anything.

MITCHELL: Just from the way she was looking at you?

STEWART: It just becomes more difficult, more thankless work. You find yourself occasionally having to lie . . . It sucks. I hate it.

MITCHELL: You mean lie to yourself about just getting through it? 

STEWART: There are just certain moments that you thought were going to be a certain way, and because they're changed, it's not you and it's not the character anymore—it's nothing. You're literally being an actor—you're pretending—and that's not what I like to do. When you look back at the film, those moments sometimes come through. But I think the way I approach things has something to do with growing up and seeing my parents go to work every day. You know, my mom is a script supervisor. It's like the family business. It never had that feeling of entertainment. It was always more like, "Eh, it's just a movie," with that crew mentality, which is, "We've done it before and we can do it again." 

MITCHELL: So having watched your parents do what they do, what sparked in you the idea of, "I want to be a part of that, but not for the reasons that they're doing it"? 

STEWART: Well, my mom has now actually written and directed a movie, so her approach to it all changed very quickly. [laughs] But I was an extra a couple times, and I thought that was fun—it was something to do to get you out of school. And then when I first started auditioning, as I said, I didn't get anything for a long time, so when I finally did getThe Safety of Objects, it was like I discovered something. It was an experience where I felt something and tapped into something and got a part, so it was like, "Well, I guess that's how you get a part." I mean, it just sounds really obvious to every actor. Yeah, of course you have to really feel it. But it's not so obvious to someone so young. 

MITCHELL: It seems like every year you have these two wildly different pulls between the bigger movies that you do, like the Twilight films, and then the smaller ones that you've done. I remember a couple of years ago when you had bothWelcome to the Rileys [2010] and The Runaways at Sundance. 

STEWART: Yeah, I think it went Twilight, Welcome to the Rileys, New Moon, Runaways, then Eclipse, so it was like one of those movies between each Twilight movie.

MITCHELL: Was that just for you to remind yourself of why you wanted to do this?

STEWART: I just happened to have enough time to be able to take other parts between those first few Twilight films. But it wasn't about proving to people that I had something else to give.

MITCHELL: With a film like Welcome to the Rileys, I wonder how you walk away from being that character. [In the film, Stewart plays Mallory, a teenage stripper who develops a friendship with a man, played by James Gandolfini, whose marriage is falling apart as he grieves over the death of his daughter.]

STEWART: Playing a character like Mallory is tough. Not to discredit anyone's personal situation or actual life, but there are so many examples of girls like that, and a film can very easily become an almost clinical rundown of what leads someone to a certain position. It's hard to play a part like that because you want everyone who has ever walked in those shoes to be like, "Yeah, I mean, that's the way it goes . . ." Pity is a really odd thing with abused women. You don't want anyone to think that you feel bad—even though you might. So it was just interesting to play that part and to work with James. I went down to New Orleans to do the film and lived by myself and trudged around the city. But walking away from that character . . . It probably still hasn't gone away completely, but for the first little while afterwards, I was so sensitive and touchy in a way that my character would never be. I was so protective and defensive of young girls, and sex in general.

MITCHELL: Then seeing your performance in Runaways, where you play this girl who is trying to figure out what she wants to be while other people are trying to force her into becoming something else—it strikes me that they're similar roles in the sense that both of these young girls are looking for a kind of family, but at the same time, both characters are incredibly mistrustful of most people. And in the case of The Runaways, you're playing a character based on real person, too, in Joan Jett. 

 STEWART: And Joan is somebody who is so protective. I mean, Joan is covered in armor. 

MITCHELL: She even wears her hair like a helmet. She's somebody who knew that she was an artist, but at the same time, was being treated like a commodity. 

STEWART: But I think it's cool to come out of somewhere where you're being pushed into this mold and then you figure out in that who you are. Maybe she wouldn't have figured out exactly who she was if she wasn't being forced into something else and fighting against it. 

MITCHELL: It seems like Joan would be another hard habit to shake. 

STEWART: She was. I went to do Eclipse right after, and I think the director of that movie might have said to another cast member that he had to beat the Joan Jett out of me. [Mitchell laughs] For a while, I just walked kind of hunched over. Joan has great defensive tools, and I became a bit attached to them. 

MITCHELL: Like which ones?

STEWART: Just the way she deals with people. I think we were promoting New Moon just as I was finishing The Runaways, and I remember going to Comic-Con with a Minor Threat T-shirt on. I was really happy and excited to be there, but I was so defensive and crazy. [laughs] It's hard to deal with the press. There are always a lot of leading questions and opinions. Of course, our work is creative, and it's subjective. But I was totally Joan Jett-ing out. We were doing interviews, and one wrong thing was said, and Joan has this crazy ability to just shut down and look at you like, "Well, I'm done now. Later." It was so . . . I'm not like that, but . . . Yeah, I was then. 

MITCHELL: The Runaways, though, must have come at an interesting time, because at that point people were just starting to have certain expectations of you. Do you feel like that gave you a perspective on it that you might not have had if you'd done the film before Twilight? 

STEWART: Oh, yeah. The frenzy we were acting out in the movie was interesting because I had experienced it with the unique success of Twilight, where people would go absolutely bat-shit-nuts-flip-out-seizure-on-the-ground-crying in front of you. Then that thing of having people want to get in . . . Joan was so protective of me with the paparazzi. They were hounding our set like crazy. She was so concerned and emotional about it, and I was always like, "It's fine. I'm fine." But it bothered her a lot. We grew to know each other so well, so she knew that I wasn't the type of person-even though a lot of people think of me like this—to not care. People think that I'm really untouchable, and that's also translated into a lot of people thinking that I'm super-ungrateful. 

MITCHELL: Where does that come from? 

STEWART: I think people are used to seeing actors be wide open and desperately giving of themselves, and while I do that on a movie set as much as I can, it's so unnatural for me to do it on television, in interviews, in anything like that. I also don't find that my process as an actor is really anyone else's business. A lot of actors have felt like that. I mean, there's that awesome quote where Joanne Woodward said, "Acting is like sex: you should do it, not talk about it." 

MITCHELL: People talk about sex now all the time. 

STEWART: Oh, I know. [laughs] But do they really talk about it personally? 

MITCHELL: They sell it. I mean, there are people who have gotten to be famous by having sex tapes of themselves out there. You can't be more forthright about that than, "Here I am having sex . . ." 

STEWART: Yeah, but they're lying while that video is being made. The act is in itself a lie. You're faking something. The girl is lying there, she's pretending that she doesn't know the camera's on, she's getting banged, and "accidentally" it leaks out? Everyone leaks their own sex tapes! That's a ploy to get famous—that's not about the sex. It's not like when Madonna did her Sex book, and it was an artistic endeavor where she acknowledged it and spoke about it and was so upfront about it. It's different. It's not upfront. It's not honest. It's a ploy to get famous. 

MITCHELL: It makes you wonder what Joanne Woodward would do nowadays if she were just getting started.

STEWART: She'd probably be kind of like me. There are a lot of other actors, too, who do this because you have to. 

MITCHELL: You have to?

STEWART: Yeah, you have to.

MITCHELL: Is there something that drives you to do it? 

STEWART: Oh, definitely. I think there are a lot of actors who act because they have an impulse to do it and they can't ignore it. But what I really mean is that they do the interview process because they have to. It's a good bargain: If I can do this part then I'll sell it. I just wish it wasn't me who had to do it because it feels very unnatural. 

MITCHELL: You don't like talking about the process of making movies?

STEWART: No, I do—I love sitting down and having actual conversations. But I don't do that sound-bite, be-candidly-funny thing. I'm so concerned with the right thing coming out . . . I know that people's judgments are fast, and in a split second I will ruin it. 

MITCHELL: Really? Having done this for as long as you have, you still feel like people have these sound-bite expectations of you, and that you either can't do it or you don't like to do it? 

STEWART: I can't do it. It's not that I fight this urge to be easily consumable. It's just that I put a lot of weight in what I do, and you and I can talk to each other in a certain way because that's how people interact, but I don't really know how to talk to the entire world. People cultivate these fully formed personalities. I've done interviews with actors who I've worked with who I really like, and I'm like, "Wow, look at you. You're just going on . . . You don't even know what you're saying!" Then you watch the interview afterwards, and they didn't really say much, but it's interesting, funny, and engaging. Whereas I sit there and look a little bit too serious, and as soon as that happens then you're uncomfortable and you don't want to watch. It's also weird talking about projects as an actor because you're so in them. I would prefer to write a paper and deliver it to everyone via e-mail. [both laugh] It's too much to think about on Jay Leno. 

MITCHELL: Well, in the context of something like The Tonight Show, people are expecting you to be that thing that you don't want to be: a performer. But, at the same time, there is such a performance aspect to what you do. You see the irony in that, right?

STEWART: Yeah, but the performance aspect does go away on set for me. The reason I choose things is because I feel like this character kind of exists. So on set, it's really more about, "Oh, man, I've got to do this justice." It's about not letting someone down.

MITCHELL: That's a lot of pressure to put on yourself. 

STEWART: Yeah, but I mean, it's the only reason to do it.

MITCHELL: You like that pressure? 

STEWART: Yeah. I don't know why anyone does the job without that pressure. 

MITCHELL: I know it's an obvious thing to say, but you must get this all the time where people come up to you and say that you're nothing like these parts you play.

STEWART: Yeah, I also get the opposite a lot, too. 

MITCHELL: Do you? 

STEWART: Yeah, a lot of times, I get, "Don't you want to do something a little bit out of your comfort zone? You always play these really forward-thinking, strong, outspoken women." But I'm like, "Are you kidding me?" If you look at the actual movies that I've done, the whole struggle is to get to that point, so it's not something that you just have so easy . . . But it's okay. It doesn't bother me. I've done okay so far.

MITCHELL: I think you're doing okay. [laughs] 

STEWART: Let's just see if I can stay here and not get kicked out of the pool. 

*Charlize Mentioning Kristen in her Interview*

MITCHELL: What you're talking about brings to mind a question: What made you want to do Snow White and the Huntsman in the first place?

THERON: It was a combination of things. I saw a great challenge in taking something that was so iconic and turning it upside down and shaking it up a little bit, which I'd never done. And then I also saw a character that was such an emotional wreck and has never truly been explored in that way. I keep talking about Jack Nicholson in The Shining, but that movie came on television at a time when I think, in many ways, I was questioning whether I should do this film or not, and that was the thing that sealed the deal to me—that and one night at 2 a.m. I woke up and watched the end of Se7en[1995] and I was like, "Oh, my god. The queen is Kevin Spacey. She's a tribal serial killer." [both laugh] Believe it or not, I'd also never been in a movie of this size and scale and epic nature, and I just thought Rupert was such a visual guy with so much passion, so I was really interested to see what it was all about. I'm a huge Kristen Stewart fan, too. There's not an ounce of her anatomy that knows how to half-ass anything. So everything just kind of aligned for me to where I felt like I would be an idiot not to do it.

MITCHELL: A lot of what you're saying reminds me of the first time we spoke. You were with your mother, and you were talking about getting that kind of sup- port and also that kind of drive from having somebody around who has your back.

THERON: You know when girls say, "I'm a girl's girl"? It has never felt right for me to say that because I don't know if I'm a girl's girl. I think I might be a full woman's woman. I've been very lucky to work with some great women who know how to hit the ball back really hard. Even the younger girls, like Kristen Stewart, I never look at them that way. I love having women like that in my life. My whole company is run by women like that. And I think a lot of that comes from my relationship with my mother. I like women who have an opinion one way or the other or who have a great sense of humor and a great sense of adventure. I can be friends with women who are not like that, but I don't have that hard emotional connection. I think we want to be around people that kind of push us and inspire us and maybe teach us. 

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Ty @kstewartnews for the heads up!