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Saturday, December 6, 2025
Kristen for The New York Times (Video: Telegraph)
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When it comes to artists and public figures, there are few things more compelling than when the people we thought we knew show us something different. It’s not an easy feat, but Kristen Stewart has managed it more than once.
Her first big shift was professional: Stewart shot to stardom in the late 2000s and early 2010s as an ingénue lead in big-budget Hollywood hits like the five “Twilight” films and “Snow White and the Huntsman.” But by her mid-20s, she largely rejected acting in popcorn movies in favor of subtler and more emotionally varied independent work, including two films with the great French director Olivier Assayas (“Clouds of Sils Maria” from 2014 and “Personal Shopper” from 2016), as well as “Spencer” (2021), for which she earned an Academy Award nomination for her performance as Princess Diana.
She has undergone a pretty profound transformation offscreen too. During her blockbuster days, Stewart, who is now 35, was a frequent target of the tabloid press, both for her relationships — notably with her “Twilight” co-star Robert Pattinson — and also for her often sullen-seeming public appearances. Flash forward to 2025, and Stewart, who publicly came out in 2017 and married the screenwriter and producer Dylan Meyer this year, has harnessed some entirely different energy. She has embraced her status as a millennial queer icon and also come to see promotional duties not merely as a chore to suffer through but, as I think you’ll see from our interview, opportunities for connection and exploration.
Now, Stewart is changing again, directing her first full-length feature, “The Chronology of Water.” The film, which is in select theaters now, is an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name. Imogen Poots stars as Lidia, a competitive swimmer who fights through a series of traumas on her way to becoming the writer she needs to be. It’s a provocative movie — formally and in its subject matter — and one that raises questions about womanhood, sexuality, excess and the stories we choose to tell about ourselves. Those remain questions with which Stewart herself is still eagerly wrestling.
You’ve been trying to make “The Chronology of Water” for close to 10 years, and it’s a memoir that involves a lot of heavy stuff: addiction, child abuse, the loss of an infant. When you first read the book, what was it about that material that made you feel like this was a story that you had to tell? It was the way that she told it; it was the fact of the telling. There’s an invitation in the text to excavate your own memories. But for me, it’s much less about the things that happened to Lidia and much more about how she reorients those things and writes them down. Just the idea of diaristic writing by women being criticized for being selfish and narcissistic — it’s like, anytime you start talking about yourself, it becomes this tired, pathetic, messy thing. And I wanted to make something tired, pathetic and messy that also felt exuberant and encouraging.
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