Kristen Stewart’s handbag is walking across the coffee table. Actually, it’s more of a cardboard box with a handle, which seems a strange fashion choice for an A-list actress in Beverly Hills, surrounded by immaculately groomed women in designer gear. Suddenly, it starts shuffling of its own accord.
“He’s a hermit crab,” explains Stewart, enthusiastically. As it transpires, she has come from a TV appearance, during which she was told to identify the creature while blindfolded, in a stunt to promote her new deep-sea horror, Underwater. She didn’t trust the TV crew to take him safely back to the pet shop afterwards, so she has brought him along. She’s setting up a terrarium at home.
In Underwater, Stewart plays deep-sea mining engineer Norah, one of a handful of crew members who survives when their rig breaks apart in an earthquake, forcing them to fend off attacks from terrifying creatures at the bottom of the ocean. As Nora, “inaccessible and emotionally remote”, her performance recalls Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in the Alien films.
Underwater, directed by William Eubank, owes a debt to Ridley Scott’s masterpiece. “It feels hugely influenced by Alien,” says Stewart. “My look, the alien’s look, even our rig, the way it’s haphazardly put together, the fact that the people living on this rig are not soldiers, they’re just people with pictures of their friends and goofy stuff that they’ve hung up on their stations.”
This role was a challenge for Stewart. “It’s ridiculous that I even did this movie,” she says, speech characteristically high speed. “I don’t even like swimming, let alone diving. We don’t f**king belong there! I felt very claustrophobic and stifled the whole time.”
On the shoot, she had to wear a “horrible” 45kg diving suit, which made her feel like she was choking. “I wanted to confront phobias that I have and I knew that if I shoved my head into something that scared me, that it would show,” she says. “I hadn’t done a commercial movie in a long time and I certainly hadn’t done an action movie, so I thought it was really a good idea to do something that was not very intellectual and purely physical… Until you realise that those things actually hold hands very intimately. ”
Shot on a New Orleans sound stage, the film used a “wet for dry” special effects technique, which limited the amount of time she had to spend submerged. But there was no escaping the suit. “It wasn’t fun and I was scared all the time,” says Stewart. “Whenever we went underwater, I was crying. I’m the kind of person who, if you hug me too hard, I’m like, ‘argh’.” Her hands embrace her body. “I hate being held down.”
Stewart grew up in Los Angeles, doing her homework on the sets of her parents’ TV shows, where her father, John, was a stage manager and her mother, Jules, a script supervisor. “My parents were really working class,” she says. “They made movies. I really looked up to them and always wanted to make movies and be a part of that. I don’t know what I’d be doing if I wasn’t an actor.”
She began acting at the age of nine and her first breakthrough came a few years later when she played Jodie Foster’s daughter in the thriller Panic Room. “I thought I was an adult when I was 12,” she says, to explain her precociousness. “I don’t know why. But I’ve never been complacent. I wasn’t brought up that way.”
It was at the age of 18, in 2008, when she rose to super-stardom, playing Bella Swann in the Twilight vampire franchise. Starring in the five-film series, which grossed over $3.3bn (£2.5bn), Stewart and her private life became the subject of wild fandom and obsession, made more intense by her relationship with co-star, Robert Pattinson.
Every day was a media frenzy. She needed bodyguards, assistants and enormous black SUVs with tactical manoeuvres to avoid relentless pursuit. None of it seems to faze her now, though – and she resists being cynical about her young fame, looking back. “Considering I was able to start working from so young, I’ve been privy to such an abundance of good.”
With the exception of Snow White and the Huntsman and the recent doomed Charlie’s Angels reboot, since Twilight Stewart has chosen lower-key, independent films such as Anaesthesia, American Ultra, Still Alice and Seberg, for which she received acclaim for her performance in the title role. She insists that path wasn’t a conscious decision. “None of the ways in which I function creatively are tactical. I’m not trying to plan a nice scheduled trajectory.”
Now 29, Stewart has learnt to live with scrutiny. Three years ago, she described herself as “so gay” while hosting an episode of Saturday Night Live, later clarifying that she is bisexual (she has dated French singer Soko, model Stella Maxwell and musician St Vincent.) She is regularly snapped by the paparazzi loading groceries into the car with her screenwriter girlfriend Dylan Meyer, and it doesn’t seem to bother her.
“Primarily,” she says, “I wake up happy. I genuinely do. Even if things are real shit, I do wake up energised going, ‘All right, let’s go.’ I am thankful for that and I know it’s actually just a chemical thing; something you’re lucky enough to be born with.
“I have lots of friends who are brilliantly intelligent and engaged with the world who wake up scared and sad,” she continues. “Obviously we live in a scary, polarised time, every day waking up a little unsure but, at the same time, I am genuinely so lucky and happy to be somebody who is generally happy… I know it’s not what you asked but I am lucky to be dosed with nice chemicals.”
And there is a lot to worry about – global warming, water scarcity and food poverty are high on her list of concerns. She turns 30 in April and questions about the future are starting to arise.
“Anyone who wants to have children, you’re like: ‘Really? Are you sure? What do you think is gonna happen to them?’ I’ve had a few friends who have recently said: ‘I’ve always thought I wanted to have kids but maybe we don’t have them now…’ And I’m like, look, stuff is always gonna be hard, even if we fatalistically think: ‘F**k, they only have 10 or 15 years, or maybe they have 80.’ It’s worth it.
“I say to my friends: ‘F**king do it! Like what the f**k. Maybe it will figure itself out and, if not, we can’t just stop. Like we have to keep going. Until we can’t anymore.’”
She hopes Underwater’s environmental themes and warnings won’t be lost beneath the special effects. “As a subplot to an existential thriller, which is super scary and blow ’em up, it underlines the fact that we shouldn’t touch things that we shouldn’t touch. And, if we do... then the monster will come after us.”
Source
