THR Kristen Stewart, who plays the late Princess Diana in Pablo Larrain’s Spencer, says there’s a big difference between her as an actress going to the depths of despair on-screen over her character’s marriage to Prince Charles and the late Royal herself.
While speaking at the Toronto Film Festival on Wednesday, Stewart reflected on her time portraying Princess Diana and explained how she felt support on set of the biopic that comes to Toronto by way of a world premiere in Venice and a North American premiere at Telluride.
“The one difference between Diana and myself, especially, is that she was alone and I was not. I had people holding me… I had a sort of safety net,” Stewart said.
Larrain’s Spencer is set over a long Christmas weekend during which Diana decides to end her doomed marriage to Prince Charles. Stewart, while being effusive in her admiration for Princess Diana, reiterated that she and the late Royal were quite different people, despite the Hollywood actress being thrust into the glare of similar superstardom after her star turn in the Twilight franchise.
“There was no way to play this part perfectly, and therefore it was actually easier, or at least easier to not be so intimidated or daunted. Because the only way to catch something wild is to be that, and I could only be my version of that and hope that I learned everything I could learn from her and then kind of meld and kind of be both me and her in what was going to be best version,” she explained about the alchemy required to play Diana on screen.
Besides the aid of a voice coach to nail down her British accent and donning costumes, hair and make-up provided by Larrain’s creative team to play the iconic late Royal, often with her classic head-tilt pose, Stewart credits her close collaboration with the Chilean director to get Diana right on the screen.
“You have to be humane and not destroy your crew and not take advantage of people and performers and artists. But if it’s coming from the right place, you can really drive someone in the ground and they like it,” Stewart said of Larrain. “As someone with ambitions to make movies, I was revived by him and blown away by his commitment. His commitment to his vision, which was so particular and weird, was feral and it was very cool. Those are the only types of people who should be making movies.”
She had equal praise for cinematographer Claire Mathon — another veteran of Larrain’s creative team — along with costume designer Jacqueline Durran, makeup and hair designer Wakana Yoshihara, and production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas.
“Claire’s a genius. She’s a woman of very few words. She’s so watchful. She’s just not thinking of what’s she’s putting out when she’s working. She’s receiving. I could get up and run across the room and somehow she would be in front of me before I got there,” Stewart recalled.
“Some people are very caught up in their own shit — composition, lighting and what they want you to do — versus what you’re going to throw at them,” she added.
Indiewire has earned early Oscar buzz for her performance as Princess Diana in Pablo Larraín’s “Spencer,” which is making its way through the fall festival circuit. It turns out her decision to take on the role came from gut instinct. Speaking during a conversation broadcast as part of the Toronto International Film Festival, Stewart said she hadn’t even read the “Spencer” script by Steven Knight before she told Larraín she was interested in playing the beloved British icon.
“He called me on the phone. At first I hadn’t read the script yet, and he proposed this idea and said he was doing this sort of weird tone poem about Diana, and asked whether or not I would be interested in tackling the subject at all, before he sent the script,” she said. “Kind of without thinking, very irresponsibly, I said ‘Yes, absolutely.'”
Stewart said normally when she takes on a role she comes from a place of “trust me, I can do this,” but when she said yes to Larraín she “did not have that.” The actress added, “I could have totally fucked it up.”
“In the moment right before I was going to say, in a word, yes or no, I was like ‘Who are you if you don’t say yes?,” Stewart continued.
“Spencer,” directed by “Jackie” director Larraín and written by “Peaky Blinders” creator Steven Knight, takes a lyrical approach to the story of Diana, describing itself as a “fable” that takes place over three tumultuous days in 1991 before the princess divorces Prince Charles. That approach worked well with Stewart’s sensibilities.
“My favorite kinds of movies are explorations and cultivating that controlled chaos, that’s how you make discoveries that are worth photographing,” the actress said, adding she didn’t feel pressure to play a pitch-perfect Diana as a result.
“She’s such a live wire and somebody who has this incredibly disarming, casual, contagious, beautiful, empathetic, warm energy that reaches out, but at the same time you always feel like there’s something wrong — she’s protecting something,” Stewart said. “You never know what’s going to happen. She walks into the room and the earth starts shaking. So I knew there was no way to play this part perfectly and therefore it was easier. Or at least easier to not be so intimidated and so daunted. I could only be my version of that and kind of hope that if I learned everything about her and absorbed her and kind of meld, and be both me and her in some sort of weird way, it was going to be the best version.”
There was one piece of Diana that Stewart knew she had to get right: Her experience as a mother.
“I think that her strength and her power and her feral, unstoppable force of nature really, really comes out when she was with her kids. She wasn’t very good at protecting herself, but she was really good at protecting them,” she said. “If you don’t get that right, you don’t get her right.”
EW By all critical accounts, Kristen Stewart has given the mother of all Princess Diana portrayals in Pablo Larraín's Spencer, and she did it with royal attention paid to the late icon's devotion to maternal love.
The 31-year-old revealed in a virtual discussion Wednesday out of the Toronto International Film Festival that she felt "markedly detached" from the British monarchy while growing up, but researching Diana's life as a mother to Prince William and Prince Harry gave her the "strongest impressions" of who she was as a person.
"It was the only thing in her life that felt sure. She wanted to feel unconditional about something. Her strength, power, and feral, unstoppable force of nature really came out when she was with her kids, because she wasn't very good at protecting herself, but she was very good at protecting them," Stewart told the audience. "As an outsider, I could feel it. That, I wanted to protect, and that was a scarier aspect of making the movie because if you don't get that right, you don't get her right."
She described Diana as someone people naturally "lean in towards" because of the disparate parts of her personality, including a "weird mix of hunger, starvation, and extreme indulgence" that led to her being both vulnerable and defensive in interviews.
"She wears her heart on her sleeve like no other. I feel like she can't hide anything, and yet we don't know anything about her. She's just someone you lean in towards," Stewart continued, adding that the artistic liberties Spencer — which follows a fantastical reimagining of Diana's Christmas vacation at Sandringham Estate, where she comes to terms with the looming end her marriage to Prince Charles (Jack Farthing) — speak to Diana's legacy.
"She provides this incredibly lush and complicated terrain to make art about. She's somebody who's so inspiring and changed the world, and I've been asked a lot about whether or not it's cool to try and tell someone's story when they're not around, somebody who was already so invaded and taken from," she said. "Because we really don't profess to know anything or present any new information, her whole life force and mission statement was that we need to come together and find connection."
And her approach has worked so far: Critics hailed the performance as one of the best of the year following its premiere on the fall festival circuit, with Stewart gaining considerable traction in the Oscar race as a result.
We will post the video of the chat here when it's available.
A short 'Spencer' clip was also shown during the chat.
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