Even the most accomplished actors can get tongue-tied trying to put into words what’s really involved in the peculiar business of pretending to be someone else onscreen. This is especially true when portraying a real-life icon like Princess Diana, whom Kristen Stewart plays in her latest film, “Spencer.”
Stewart delivers an uncanny, devastating portrait of one of the 20th century’s most famous, beloved and misunderstood women in the biopic, which hits Bay Area theaters Friday, Nov. 5. Ever since the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September, Stewart has been deemed by many critics a lock for a best actress Oscar nomination. Her Diana is mesmerizing, yet the 31-year-old actress — who shot to global fame herself in 2008 with the first “Twilight” film — admits it’s not because of flawless mimicry alone, but because of something magnetic, more innately enigmatic, in her character.
It’s a “total interpretive dance,” Stewart said during a recent video call with The Chronicle, just hours before she walked the red carpet at the movie’s Los Angeles debut last week. “The thing about actors playing real people is you try to get as close to the things about them that fascinate you by doing research, and then you allow it to find its way into your body in an intrinsic and physical way so you can allow it to be natural.”
“Spencer” gives audiences a disturbing look, as if from inside Diana’s psyche, at an especially dark period at the tail end of her disastrous marriage to Charles, Prince of Wales (played by Jack Farthing). The movie takes place over the course of a Christmas holiday weekend at the queen’s Sandringham country estate. The royal family has gathered for lavish dining and hunting, where Diana is expected to wear assigned outfits that even the fashion-forward princess sees as absurdly empty gestures when she craves actual affection and connection, something she only experiences with her sons.
Over the excruciating three days, Diana’s feelings of being literally trapped — in a miserable union, and in the Windsors’ stultifying traditions like being weighed upon arrival (a cruel practice for the bulimic princess) and being told to wear a pearl choker that Charles also gifted to his lover, Camilla — become overwhelming.
Stewart, joined by Chilean director Pablo Larrain (“Jackie”) for the video interview, explained that she immersed herself in books, archival photos and interviews of Diana in preparation. She watched hours of television footage to approximate Diana’s walk and lanky, poised bearing. She perfected her trademark doe-eyed, chin-down look. She also worked with the same dialect coach who helped Emma Corrin play Diana in “The Crown” and Naomi Watts play the princess in the 2013 film “Diana.”
And yet, Stewart also thought hard about the impossibility of depicting anyone, let alone someone so well known all over the world, with exactitude. Latching onto key mannerisms makes “Saturday Night Live” impersonations successful, but something more layered and nuanced was required “to retain her spirit and get at her vitality,” Stewart said.
Searching for a relatable analogy, Stewart described it “like when you hear a friend tell a story about another friend that you know well, and suddenly they sort of turn into that person. It’s because there’s a literal resonance, an echo of them in the impression. I spent a lot of time absorbing (Diana), and I got close to my idea of who she was and how she felt, but it’s a lyrical, diagonal glance.”
She and Larrain admitted they’re attempting something in “Spencer” that’s more poetic than an exacting impersonation or docu-style re-enactment. Billed in its opening credits as “a fable from a true tragedy,” “Spencer” has haunting, even gothic, elements. It leaves the bounds of realism behind. (Diana, for instance, sees the ghost of Anne Boleyn, one of Henry VIII’s executed wives, haunting Sandringham’s halls.)
“Before making the movie, I thought that I was going to be able to understand who she was,” Larrain said. “Believe me, I have no idea.”
Yet, he was energized by the challenge of what he called “the absurdity of trying to chase something that is impossible to actually capture,” namely Diana’s true nature.
“What’s interesting is that everyone has an opinion on who she was, and all of our perceptions of her have been distorted by the media,” said Larrain, who sees similarities to his 2016 film “Jackie” in which Natalie Portman played Jackie Kennedy, another famous woman on the brink of grief-induced transformation.
Take Diana’s “look down, eyes up thing,” Stewart said. “It’s an example of so much push and pull in her energy. I think she was desperately trying to communicate, and that look said, ‘I’m not allowed to talk, but I’m trying to tell you with my eyes what’s going on.’ ”
Stewart said it’s important to remember that “every picture ever taken of her has a perspective, and it would be a different picture if that photographer took a step to the right or the left.”
“I never stood in the same room as (Diana). I don’t know what the temperature was. Were her shoulders up by her ears because she was insecure? Or was she just cold?” Stewart wondered.
Diana is ultimately unknowable, and yet, Stewart said, “what she left behind was a lot of people desperate to know her and reaching towards her — which we still are.”
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