Kristen Stewart is outlining her ideal Christmas in Los Angeles. “I live by Thai Town and it’s the only food that’s available on Christmas Day,” she explains. “So I go to eat coconut soup early in the morning.” It’s not exactly chestnuts roasting on an open fire, but then, the 30-year-old former Twilight star has never done things conventionally.
This festive period, she stars in Happiest Season, which, on first sight, has everything you might expect from a Hollywood studio movie designed for the holidays: it is glitzy and twinkly, and the aspirational characters live in large houses with Christmas trees so big you would think they had been shipped direct from Norway. Only this Yuletide story is a little different.
Stewart plays Abby, who agrees to spend her Christmas with her girlfriend, Harper (Mackenzie Davis) – only to discover that Harper never came out to her conservative parents. No prizes for guessing that Happiest Season is a game of hide and seek, as Abby and Harper pretend to be roommates when they arrive, with Harper promising she’ll reveal all to her mother and father after the holidays.
A mainstream Christmas movie with a gay couple at its centre – not relegated to the support act – is something of a revelation. “I think it’s something that we’ll look back on and wonder why it hadn’t been reflected in our art a little earlier,” says Stewart. “Because obviously we have acknowledged queer existence in an open, cultural way… but do we see it in commercial film? No.”
It is no exaggeration to say Stewart is currently Hollywood’s highest-profile LGBTQ+ star. In 2017, when she hosted the US comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL), she went into a riff in her opening monologue about Donald Trump (who had been tweeting about her break-up with her one-time Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson). “And Donald,” she declared, to hysterical cheers from the audience, “I’m so gay, dude.”
Watching that night was Happiest Season’s co-writer and director Clea DuVall, who came out several years before Stewart. “I’d always been such a fan of Kristen’s work… but when I saw her on SNL a few years ago, she was so funny and silly and warm,” she says. “It was this whole other side to her, and seeing that she was able to be so funny and so real made her perfect to play Abby.”
For Stewart, DuVall’s film signals a move into a more comic arena. Her comfort zone is tough-as-nails parts – Alzheimer’s tale Still Alice, the traumatic movie-star biopic Seberg, or the spiritual psychodrama Personal Shopper. She began in the heavyweight dramatic leagues, aged 12, when she caught attention in David Fincher’s Panic Room, playing Jodie Foster’s tomboy daughter.
So how was it finding her funny bone? “It was different, for sure,” she admits. “I was intimidated and really bowled over by the talented comedic actors we had around, but also encouraged, because they make it seem fun.” She breaks off, softly laughing at something that’s just struck her. “As lesbian as I am in the movie, I do play a character who’s the ‘straight man’.”
When we spoke over Zoom, with Stewart in LA, Happiest Season was all set for a major cinema release over Thanksgiving in the US. But with cinemas still shut due to the pandemic, the film is now being released online. In some ways that’s a major disappointment, but then again, the point of a film like Happiest Season is that it is revisited every Christmas. The idea that families might sit around and watch a mainstream lesbian romcom feels pleasingly radical.
“Little kids need to see Christmas movies where they might see themselves reflected in a broader sense,” says Stewart. “Let’s not marginalise the marginalised in art. Let’s allow there to be a lightness and a sort of ease and pleasure. There’s a delight to the movie that I think is really imperative to get across in this context.”
Talking to Stewart, you get the sense that being a role model has been thrust upon her. “It’s not a proactive thing I do,” she says. But how does she feel when fans tell her that her openness has helped them to come out? “Nothing makes me happier. But I’m not trying to push this stuff.” Her preference would be “a balanced and equal exchange” of experiences. “I am encouraged just as much by that.”
Raised in LA by parents in the entertainment industry – her father worked as a stage manager and TV producer, her mother as a script supervisor – Stewart wasn’t living amid the strict religious or conservative backdrops that some face when coming out. Still, she knew the confusion of understanding your own sexuality. “Growing up, trying to figure out whether it’s going to be OK is an experience I can definitely relate to,” she says.
She dated men when she was younger – most famously Pattinson – but by 2013, she was in a relationship with visual effects producer Alicia Cargile. “When I was 22, I grew into understanding myself in a more ambiguous way,” she says. She felt pressure to “put a label on it” and define what she was. “I was like, ‘That doesn’t really work for me.’” Following a relationship with the model Stella Maxwell, she is currently dating screenwriter Dylan Meyer.
Even now, Stewart knows that being gay isn’t easy – “living in a world where holding the hand of the person you love can make you or others uncomfortable”. She explains that she has just got back from a small road trip. “I entered some, like, Trumpian territory, and I felt scared. I have experience of trying to shape what my experience looks like for others, for it to be digestible and not threatening.”
Stewart’s next role will be far tougher than Happiest Season: she is prepping to play Princess Diana in a new film by Pablo Larraín, said to be set over the weekend she resolves to leave Prince Charles. “I’ve not been as consumed by something in so long,” she recently told Access Hollywood.
Having directed shorts and videos already, she is also planning her feature debut with Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir The Chronology of Water, which deals with the author’s bisexuality and addiction issues. The book contains “some of my favourite writing”, says Stewart. “The only reason to make it a movie is because I want people to see how I see it.”
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