The curtains part and Kristen Stewart enters, a streak of pale peach and bleached blonde framed by plush scarlet. The 29-year-old actress has just slipped into the library of an 18th-century Venetian palazzo, dressed in acid-washed jeans, a black bralette, and a deconstructed patchwork blazer that looks like it hasn’t finished downloading yet. She blends into her surroundings like Let’s Dance-era David Bowie in a marble throne room – which is to say not at all, but also perfectly.
A decade ago, few people had the heroine of the Twilight vampire romance series earmarked as a film festival queen in the making. Yet the night before we meet, on the red carpet for her latest movie, she gets the kind of reception usually reserved for the likes of Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Huppert. Stewart is unusual among her peers for having converted Hollywood franchise success into European art-house cachet: the only other actor of her generation to do so has been Robert Pattinson, her Twilight co-star and sometime paramour. The affection runs deep. She is the only American actress ever to have won a César, the French Oscar. Why does she think she and Europe clicked? “Probably for the same reasons I was thrown out of every audition for a commercial as a kid,” she grins.
Stewart is in Venice with Seberg, a fact-based drama about the actress Jean Seberg’s hounding by the FBI in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Seberg was barely 30 at the time, and best known for starring in the New Wave classic Breathless. But in response to her vocal and financial support of civil rights groups, including the Black Panthers, the US government vowed to ruin her, brutally and publicly. She was relentlessly surveilled. Her telephones were tapped. False stories were planted about the questionable parentage of her unborn child, who died after Seberg subsequently went into premature labour. In 1979, at the age of 40, she committed suicide; her death was blamed by Romain Gary, her second husband, on the preceding decade of FBI harassment. The film, directed by Benedict Andrews, presents all this in the style of a paranoid thriller, with Jack O’Connell and Vince Vaughn as two of the agents tasked with bringing her down, and Stewart as Seberg herself.
The idea of playing another actress made Stewart nervous. “Anything that’s google-able is intimidating,” she explains. “Because [people] can do the side-by-side thing.” But Andrews had sought her out for the role specifically because of the parallels between the pair’s lives. As he noted in Venice: “Both were thrust into the public eye at a young age, and both managed to survive intense media attention.”
Stewart bridles a little at the comparison, but concedes the wider point. “There’s obviously a darkness, and an intensity to Jean’s story that my life is not steeped in,” she says. “But, I am so aware of the fact that people are constantly staring at me. So this was not a job that required a wild imagination.” To capture Seberg’s growing paranoia, Stewart says she had to allow herself “to fall into the holes of it – the same ones I try to skip over in my own life. I can be sitting in a restaurant and see people trying to listen to things. But I’ve given up worrying about it. I’ve relinquished any claim to my life being anything else.”
Shruggy candour is Stewart’s default register: it’s what you’d expect from a Hollywood doyenne with nothing to lose, rather than an actress yet to reach 30. Last year, she disclosed that, after coming out as bisexual in 2017, she’d been advised not to let herself be photographed holding female partners’ hands in public because maintaining a more conventional image “might get [her] a Marvel movie”. She didn’t take the tip, and has been pictured since with girlfriends including the singer St Vincent, the model Stella Maxwell, and, currently, the screenwriter Dylan Meyer.
These completely non-scandalous images have helped to normalise the idea, still thorny even five years ago, that a young, successful film star could also be openly gay. And while the Marvel film did not materialise, she did recently co-star in a reboot of Charlie’s Angels: not a box office hit (it barely scraped back its production budget) but a change of pace nevertheless.
As we speak, the release of Charlie’s Angels is still a couple of months off, and Stewart seems a little perplexed that it’s a film she has actually made. Elizabeth Banks, its writer and director, told Stewart: “ ‘I have so much fun with you. Why aren’t you ever like that on screen?’ ” Stewart recalls. “She thought people needed to see that, which was really sweet of her. So it’s a fun and silly movie, but that’s because girls are fun and silly. And the idea that it would help other people see that I’m not so serious was really appealing.”
Seberg challenged her to tease that out of herself, too. Stewart believes part of the reason the actress’s support for civil rights was seen as so dangerous was because of her star power: she could win over a room just by walking into it. “There was an ease with which Jean lived her life, even at such a young age, that’s taken me a long time to get to,” she says. “I’m almost 30. She had that at 15. When I was 15, I was in a f---ing ball in the corner.”
Yet she attributes her latter-day uncurling – including the actual act of coming out, which she did on live television – to the currently polarised political climate in the US and elsewhere. “The us-and-them factor is actually quite comforting,” she says. “I’m not afraid of saying the things that I believe in because, at the moment, I feel that like-minded people are more inclined to stand together. I feel very substantiated by that.”
It’s worth reflecting that the 15-year-old ball in the corner had already starred opposite Jodie Foster in David Fincher’s Panic Room three years previously: for a self-styled shy kid, Stewart chose an odd line of work. Born in Los Angeles to John, a stage manager, and Jules, a script supervisor, she remembers watching her parents “being really, really busy all the time – they were working-class as f---. And all I wanted to do was be a part of that circus”. Aged eight, she told her mother she wished to become an actor, “because I just wanted to be on sets so badly and, as a little kid, it’s the only thing you can do. So she was shocked, but she was nice enough to drive my ass all over town, taking a million auditions for a year and a half.”
The roles she got were mostly in adverts, though she appeared as a cave girl playing hoopla in The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas: two seconds of screen time, with her back to the camera for both. “It was thousands of random little parts, where you’re supposed to be dimpled and smiling,” she says. Aged nine, she was ready to give up when she was ordered to dance on the set of an ad: “And there was no music on or anything, and all of these kids next to me were bopping around. I was just, like, ‘This is not for me. I cannot do this’.” Her mother made her stick to one last audition for an independent film, The Safety of Objects, directed by Rose Troche. The role was as a divorcee’s tomboyish daughter with an under-age smoking habit. She got the part.
“If my mom hadn’t said, ‘You scheduled something so you should do what you said you were going to do,’ I wouldn’t be sitting here right now,” she says. What would she be doing instead? “I don’t know what the f--- I would be doing. I was a weird little kid. Acting was a strange impulse for me, considering the type of kid that I was. But I found my people. Thank God.”
For the next half-decade, in films such as Panic Room, Cold Creek Manor and Into the Wild, she was that teenager who could do intensity. But it was being cast in Twilight opposite Robert Pattinson in 2007 that turned the pair into the Bogie and Bacall of the YA era. The cultural importance of the five Twilight films, which made $3.3 billion worldwide on budgets a fraction of that, can’t be overstated. Hollywood had been obsessively courting teenage boys since the Eighties, but here was proof that stories centred on girls and young women could also be blockbusters. Twilight paved the way for the Hunger Games franchise, the new female-led Star Wars films, an all-women Ghostbusters and Captain Marvel.
It’s a legacy about which Stewart is ambivalent; while she acknowledges it, she maintains that no one working on Twilight saw themselves as a trailblazer. “Twilight had no idea what it was until it became what it was,” she says. “It was that change that kick-started the whole thing.”
Today, with hindsight, part of her “thinks it’s really cool. But another part is, like, people took that model, which was never meant to be a model, and were like, ‘I’m gonna make a ton of money and get a lot of attention,’ and then made s---ty movies. I’m not saying any of the ones you just mentioned are s---ty, but I think it’s easy to make things that feel full of nothing. Some of the movies we struggle so f---ing hard with, and make with the best intentions, and that nobody sees, are the most beautiful”.
After the original Twilight, the films people tell her mean the most to them are the two she has made with the French director Olivier Assayas: the psychological mystery-drama Clouds of Sils Maria, for which she won the César, and Personal Shopper – an unsettling, Hitchcockian ghost story, and one of the great films of the 2010s.
This is what she loves most now; possibly even what called to her at eight, the ball-in-the-corner kid for whom dimples and smiles were not a strong suit. “Being able to be closer to people through strange little stories is the sun my Earth revolves around,” she says. “It’s my favourite thing, literally – excavating and meditating on a subject with just a few people that care, and everyone else doesn’t. And it’s just us together. It’s the best feeling.”
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