Even by teenage standards, Kristen Stewart was an anxious teenager. At night, as her head hit the pillow, she would start worrying about what might happen the next day and whether she would have any control over it. She certainly couldn’t dance as if nobody was watching, as the modern adage goes.
“Do you dance freely?” she asks, in a tone that suggests that even at 31, she finds the very idea inconceivable. “It’s hard to do. I love watching someone feel suddenly compelled to go move in front of other people to music. I think it’s really cool. It’s just never been my natural instinct. Dancing is embarrassing. So embarrassing.”
Diana, the late Princess of Wales, studied ballet for years and famously loved dancing; Freddie Mercury reportedly once smuggled her into a gay dance club. Accordingly, Chilean director Pablo Larrain planned from the start that Spencer, his often harrowing film about three crucial – albeit imagined – days in the princess’ life, would culminate in a fabulous dance sequence. Stewart, as Diana, would abandon herself to terpsichorean ecstasy through room after room at their version of Sandringham House, down the corridors and then out into the garden to let her hair down among the topiary. It would not be choreographed. It would be spontaneous.
‘Because of her I felt like ... such a leader!’: Kristen Stewart embraced Princess Diana’s essential goodness.
For Stewart, that was at least as daunting as more obvious differences: the fact that she was 13 centimetres shorter than Diana, for example, not to mention as totally Californian as Diana was English. But Larrain, she remembers, kept telling her to run, which she now thinks was key to finding her character.
What I love about her ... is that she can’t hide a thing. It’s hard to decode her life. But her skin is honest.
“She likes moving forward. And I like that feeling. I like f---ing going for something. Literally any time Pablo called ‘action’ and I was moving down a hallway, no matter what, without fail he’d go ‘Go, go faster, go, go, go!’ And I’d be like ‘oh my god, I cannot go any faster!’ But that was my favourite part.” The dance sequence finally explodes into a run. It works brilliantly.
When Spencer was first screened at the Venice Film Festival, Stewart’s performance was hailed as the best of her career and Oscar buzz was immediate. Of course, she also had detractors; casting the girl from the Twilight vampire movies as England’s Rose was always going to ruffle feathers. Some of that early awards momentum has been lost, thanks as much to a succession of COVID-fudged release dates as the fickle favours of the Oscar popularity meter, but Stewart says she doesn’t care.
“The Oscars are such a funny thing,” she told Variety in a recent online interview. “There are so many incredible movies and performances that barely get seen. [But] I really appreciate that something that I was involved in has ignited such a large conversation. We don’t make movies to not connect with each other.”
Spencer is set over three days of Christmas at the Royal holiday residence at Sandringham. Every moment is timed and steeped in tradition and protocol. Diana’s clothes are laid out for her before each meal. She cannot so much as decide to switch shoes. Nearby is the house where she grew up, now dilapidated and unsafe, with a scarecrow still in the home field wearing an old coat of her father’s. She yearns to go there, to be alone in the dark with her childhood memories.
Meanwhile, her own children are her anchor in the present; she wakes them at night to play a game and hides in their bathroom to vomit. Her husband tells her she should learn to become two people – one for herself, one for the cameras – but she can’t do it. “What I love about her, even when she’s not comfortable but she is making everyone else feel good, is that she can’t hide a thing,” says Stewart. “We don’t know exactly what is going on, obviously. It’s hard to decode her life. But her skin is honest. Like her SKIN is honest!” It is at this point that Diana recognises that to save her own sanity, she must leave.
None of this pretends to be documentary reality. There must have come a point when Diana decided to leave Prince Charles, but there is nothing to say this was it. An opening title warns us this is a fairytale. From the first grand dinner, when Diana senses that she is being stifled by the necklace Charles has given her for Christmas and claws at it until its pearls fall into her soup and then eats them, you know you are in a fantastic world. The castle where she is immured is actually a German schloss standing in for Sandringham. It is nothing like Sandringham’s scramble of architectural styles: it is grand, daunting, blank-faced and formally realised, evoking the family’s Saxe-Coburg-Gotha heritage.
Stewart says she loved being Diana. Clearly, at a day-to-day level, she lived her rather than imitated her; even now, she speaks of Diana in the present tense. Actors are generally wary of mimicry, but getting the princess’ fast, breathy delivery and quick, infectious laugh right were crucial. “I tried to do a perfect impression! I definitely did try to do that,” she says. “She is so specific. It’s not just having an English accent. It was about being really observant and picking out certain ways that she moved, affectations or certain lilts in her voice.
“And I think I do a pretty good impression, but the only thing that is going to link those up is that in between those moments you have to be yourself, because you have to be responsive and raw.” Between the recognisable Diana tags, she brought her own awkwardness, her own anxiety, that itchy discomfort that made the teenage Stewart look as if she wished she could disentangle herself from her own skin. “The best direction that Pablo gave me was on like day two, when he said you need to trust that you know her. Relax.” She had simply to be.
She still was fighting for a particular survival. And she won, she got it.
Simply being Diana, she stopped worrying about her green eyes and want of height. “I felt I was like her. That I suddenly grew. And it was really, really nice to pretend to be her, [because] she made people feel good and to do that feels really good, even if you’re just pretending. Because of her I felt like, I don’t know, such a leader! It’s not like I don’t have these things, but she just has them so magically that even to pretend to have them was like a beautiful experience. It was joyous.”
There is one obvious parallel in their real lives. During Stewart’s K-Stew years, when she was the star of the Twilight series and involved, on and off screen, with co-star Robert Pattinson, she was the object of constant paparazzi attention. She was only 17 when she made the first of the series, although she had been acting since she was nine; Diana Spencer was engaged to Prince Charles at 19. “She was so young,” Stewart groans. She might not have been quite as naive as Diana, but Stewart was young too.
Of course, she adds quickly, even at her most famous, she endured only a fraction of the attention that deluged the Princess of Wales. “She was so singularly famous, but having said that – yes, of course, I have navigated a life where you are always assuming people are looking at you, even if they’re not – but most of the time they are – and negotiating how you present yourself versus how you feel inside. Wanting to come across truly” – Stewart long ago resolved to say what she wanted in interviews, regardless – “while knowing that sometimes telling God’s honest truth will give the wrong impression. Or that by trying to reveal yourself, somehow you get in your own way. I feel that in her.”
In recent years, Stewart has pursued arthouse or oddball projects: her previous film was a gay holiday romance, Happiest Season, while her next is a dystopian fantasy by David Cronenberg, Crimes of the Future. Anybody else in these films would not stir much interest on the celebrity websites. She remains in their sights, however, partly because even the handmaidens of vampires never die, at least in an age of video on demand, and partly because she is an out gay celebrity and thus the very lifeblood of the liberal chat shows. Recently she confirmed rumours of her engagement to scriptwriter Dylan Meyer during an interview on the Howard Stern show. Meyer is not at all famous, but they make a beautiful pap snap when out doing their shopping. Cue much excitement on the bridal sites.
“You know, I work a lot,” Stewart says. “And I’m lucky I love what I do. So I hate that people follow me around but, you know, there’s no way round it. That kind of attention is a pretty ephemeral thing. If something’s unhealthy for you or hurting you, it’s pretty easy to turn your back on it. Not easy, but it is an option. Also, I’m fine. Look, ironically, [Diana] did die in a car accident, but if you take that away, she still was fighting for a particular survival. And she won, she got it. I never had to fight for that. I’m annoyed by paparazzi, but I’m not running away from anything.”
Not yet, anyway. Stewart’s starved, tightly wired Diana is a princess in a tower. As long as she plays by the rules, she can’t run away, but she can pull certain strings. Pablo Larrain’s last film in English was Jackie, with Natalie Portman playing President Kennedy’s widow. He was asked to direct Jackie, whereas Spencer was his own idea, but he doesn’t think he would have done it if he hadn’t done Jackie first.
“I think what is in common is you have women who were linked to very powerful families, who would marry powerful and strong and known men and were women able to define themselves in an interesting way through the media.”
Surely they were both women severely limited by their circumstances, at the same time as enjoying enormous privilege? “Of course, both were privileged, but that is something that most people feel about themselves,” says Larrain. “The idea that we don’t have a lot of room to move, that we are in a context that might feel oppressive, is something a lot of us can experience. I know very few people who don’t feel like that.” She was the people’s princess in more ways than one.
Stewart reflects on the comparisons that could be made with the subject of her last biopic, the actor and Black Power activist Jean Seberg, who was hounded by the FBI. “Both of their lives were very rich,” she muses. “There are millions of reasons why I did these movies, but there is so much more to their stories that it was kind of nice to give them another chance to be seen, do you know what I mean? Even after they’re no longer with us.
“And there is a huge question here, about whether you want to do movies about people who have already felt stolen from. Aren’t you kind of doing the same thing? But I feel the multiplicity of art is a beautiful thing. What they craved is connection – and we connect to the memory of them. We’re not claiming to know anything. These movies are like dreams. The only way to be super truthful is to learn as much as you can, but to write a poem. I know it’s called a biopic, but it’s really not. It’s just three days of imagined time.”
Spencer is in cinemas from January 20 (in Australia).
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