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She first shot to fame as a child actor, before solidifying her status on the global stage at the age of 18, in one of the highest-grossing movie franchises of all time – the Twilight Saga. Now 34, actor KRISTEN STEWART talks to BILLIE JD PORTER about her electrifying new movie, Love Lies Bleeding, defying Hollywood, and why she’s feeling happier than ever.
On a sun-drenched afternoon in Los Angeles, Kristen Stewart is winding down her latest press tour. We’re in her home office, nestled on a hillside in the Los Feliz neighborhood, overlooking far-reaching views of the city. After a whirlwind first quarter of 2024, this time marks the end of one chapter for Stewart, before her next is written.
Since premiering at the Sundance Film Festival at the beginning of the year, Love Lies Bleeding, the sophomore feature from writer-director Rose Glass, has gripped audiences and critics alike, due in large part to Stewart’s spellbinding portrayal of Lou – a seemingly nihilistic gym manager, whose world is turned upside down when she falls hard and fast for a female bodybuilder.
“I think we were shocked that we could even get this made,” she tells me, as we make our way to her back porch. “Because it's so weird. It’s violent and kind of irredeemable at times, but it makes you look; it’s scary. It’s confronting.”
To box the film into any one of the categories it’s been labeled thus far – action, thriller, romance, mystery, neo-noir – feels reductive. Glass has cited both Showgirls and Saturday Night Fever as influences, while one Letterboxd review calls it, “True Romance for the gays.” Somehow, Love Lies Bleeding invokes the spirit of all these legendary titles, yet is at once in a league of its own: a bold, genre-bending fever dream that oozes sex, vulnerability and surrealism simultaneously.
In amongst this chaos, Stewart’s performance strikes a delicate subtlety, that leaves you moved to tears in one moment, and laughter the next. “I kind of feel like, in the most dramatic moments of your life, it does get hilarious… It’s an odd mix of tones,” she says. “That’s why Rose is so fucking good. You’d think that would be clunky.”
There’s an almost childlike effervescence to the way Stewart speaks about working with Glass, becoming so animated at times that she lifts up from her seat, excitedly remarking at the filmmaker’s fearlessness, her character design, and her flat-out rejection of the “prescriptive bullshit” that many industry executives have come to expect from female-perspective art. “I’m so in awe of her… and it’s been really inspiring. But, at the same time I’m, like, Whew, I am so not there yet.”
Only time will tell. When we meet, Stewart is relishing the last two weeks of calm, before embarking on what is set to be a career-defining project of her own; directing her first feature. The film is based on The Chronology of Water – a piercing 2011 memoir by American writer Lidia Yuknavitch that explores her experiences of addiction, childhood sexual abuse, and ultimately finding both writing and competitive swimming as a means of catharsis.
“I’m in what they call, ‘soft prep’, which sounds kind of weird,” Stewart says. “It’s the dreamy place that you get to live in before you actually have your crew at your disposal.” To some degree, this soft prep has been in motion for over seven years. After gaining rights to the material, she first announced the project at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, before going on to attach British actor Imogen Poots to play the lead. But the journey to bring the project into fruition hasn’t been easy; Stewart has been vocal about her plight in financing the picture as recently as this year, having stated in January that she would quit acting until she could get the film over the line.
“It’s kind of a self-conscious thing to talk about, because it’s hard to get anything made. You know, [a film] that’s not regurgitating something that’s pretty standardized,” she muses. “My movie is about incest and periods and a woman violently repossessing her voice and body, and it is, at times, hard to watch… but it’s gonna be a fucking thrill ride. And I think that’s commercial, but I don’t think that I have any gauge on what that means,” she laughs. “I think people would want to see that, but then… I think maybe people wanna watch movies about, like, Jesus and dogs.”
To bring her vision to life, Stewart is taking production for the film to Latvia – rather than in the movie-making bubble of her native Los Angeles, where she lives with her fiancée, the screenwriter Dylan Meyer. It’s a decision which she tells me is empowering her to have the freedom she needs for a truly explorative process. The small, northern-European country will be playing backdrop to scenes in New York, San Diego, Florida and the Pacific Northwest, spanning three decades of the story. “It’s a fledgling film culture there. Look, I’m all about the way we make movies here [in the US], but I needed a sort of radical detachment. I am not a director yet. I need to make a student film. I can’t do that here.”
There is a raw, self-effacing candor that emanates from Stewart – a multi-award-winning, Academy Award-nominated actor who has been in the entertainment industry since childhood, and who played the lead in one of the highest-grossing movie franchises in history. Despite her position in Hollywood – across acting, producing, and now directing – she speaks about the machine, that she is unarguably a part of, with a sense of distance and impossibly charming cynicism. As we dig into her decision to hold out as long as she has, to create the art she wants to, her passion for the material itself is clear, but there’s something deeper at play too. Her choices feel like a retaliation against an industry where artists, specifically women, are so often forced to compromise on their instincts to succeed.
“[There’s a] thinking that we can check these little boxes, and then do away with the patriarchy, and how we’re all made of it,” she considers. “It’s easy for them to be like, ‘Look what we’re doing. We’re making Maggie Gyllenhaal’s movie! We’re making Margot Robbie’s movie!’ And you’re like, OK, cool. You’ve chosen four… And I’m in awe of those women, I love those women [but] it feels phony. If we’re congratulating each other for broadening perspective, when we haven’t really done enough, then we stop broadening.”
Two days before we meet, Stewart rang in her 34th birthday, an occasion which she tells me she would not have ordinarily celebrated, if it wasn’t for the encouragement of her loved ones. (Meyer, her partner of five years, shared birthday wishes on Instagram, captioning a Polaroid of Stewart cross-legged on a bed and holding their cat, “I like really really love you and am wishing you a meteor shower of good stuff in the year to come.”) But there is a deep gratitude Stewart feels for this specific time in her life.
“I am very, very happy to be my exact age,” she states, contemplating the ways her creative priorities have shifted over time. “As an actor, I’m called upon to serve other people’s visions. You get greedy; it feels good to be called upon… even if you don’t love the thing. I think it’s nice that, as I’ve gotten older, I would much prefer to tailor my experiences to result-oriented goals, versus, just, ‘This is gonna feel good for me right now.’”
Her contentment also seems anchored in the knowledge that, while her experience as a woman in the public eye has been far from easy, it was a precursor to an era that is even more merciless. “Even if we’re still emotionally violent towards women right now, it’s so much more passive aggressive… [Before] it was just so fucking straight up.”
Stewart is shrewd to the fame game and has found ways to navigate the scrutiny. She’s conflicted about social media, on the one hand labeling it fake and performative. “But then I’m like, that is presumptuous and totally reductive because everything you’re seeing, you can see something true about it.” She only has a secret Instagram account that she keeps private and purely for “selfies with friends”.
But there are public-facing parts of the job she has come to enjoy. Her style in particular has evolved into a distinctively playful mix of casual-meets-luxury, bringing an effortless edge to red-carpet looks. “If [fashion] wasn’t part of the job, I would wear the same thing every day… and I wouldn’t know that part of myself, which is actually kind of fun.”
For the PORTER cover shoot, a few days before our meeting (incidentally, for Twilight fans, on the day of the solar eclipse), Stewart loved collaborating with the team and photographer Zoey Grossman to create a story that she wanted to break the mould. “I’m lucky to have done a lot of photo shoots… but it’s always in some chic, mid-century house, and you’re like, lounging fancily around some domestic environment. The whole idea [with these images] was that we wanted to make them all feel stretched. I just read this story about a housewife who realizes she’s a ghost, and I was like, ‘What if [we pretend] I’ve been in this photo shoot for a hundred years?’ I love working with Zoey. You can really try things and do wild shit.”
As we get ready to say goodbye, I’m struck by the unguardedness with which Stewart has spoken; with no publicist and a palpable aversion to the sycophancy that so many in the industry find themselves slaves to. “I’m embarrassed by anything inauthentic,” she laughs, “But then I’m like, what is ‘authentic’?” From where I’m sitting, it doesn’t seem like she needs to look much further.
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