Kristen attends the Architectural Digest Design Making a Difference event in LA - 24 February 2026

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Kristen on the cover of The Telegraph Luxury Magazine

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We will post the full interview when available.

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Kristen covers Cultured Magazine Artists on Artists Issue with an interview by Olivier Assayas

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Olivier Assayas didn’t read the screenplay for Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, but he would have greenlit the project immediately.

“This is the movie of someone who needs badly to make a movie,” he tells Stewart over Zoom one morning in November. Assayas, who directed the 35-year-old actor-turned-filmmaker in 2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria and 2016’s Personal Shopper, knows a thing or two about a film made on one’s own terms at all costs. For Disorder, his own 1986 feature debut, he was offered the crew of the monumental French director Alain Resnais. Assayas turned the opportunity down, opting to continue working with his far less seasoned peers. “The foundational decision I made in filmmaking,” he continues, “was not to go the safe route.”

With The Chronology of Water, an adaptation of championship swimmer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name, Stewart demonstrates the safe route is of no interest to her either. The Imogen Poots-led deep dive into the long shelf life of trauma refuses linear narrative or easy viewing. The reviews it received out of Cannes, where it premiered in May, testify to Stewart’s ability to successfully helm an unconventional project. American audiences will see for themselves when the film arrives in theaters Dec. 5, but Stewart has already proved her mettle to the audience member she cares about most—herself. The Chronology of Water spent almost a decade in development limbo, a period during which the actor became well acquainted with rejection. “Every producer in town was like, ‘So what’s it about? A swimmer who gets raped by her father?’” she tells Assayas. “That’s just a hard no.”

It’s telling that it was a little-known indie distributor, the Forge, that picked up the American rights for the film, reaffirming for Stewart that Hollywood is no petri dish for independent cinema these days. “You have to leave this country to do that,” she insists.

But Stewart isn’t done with the industry just yet. Next year, she’ll star in her wife Dylan Meyer’s directorial debut, The Wrong Girls, opposite Alia Shawkat. The film will be her first comedy, proof that even someone who has been a fixture onscreen since the age of 9 can still surprise us. She’ll follow that performance with her first TV series, The Challenger, where she plays a member of NASA’s first diversified class of astronauts in 1978. Also in the queue is Full Phil, where Stewart acts as Woody Harrelson’s estranged daughter on a Paris trip gone awry.

For this Artists on Artists issue cover story with Assayas, she sifts through the victories, obstacles, and lessons of a life spent on the screen.

Olivier Assayas: I can see the notes for your film on the wall behind you. Do you function like that?

Kristen Stewart: Well, I’ve only functioned once in my life, this being my first [directorial] project. It was necessary to see the movie as a body, because some of the fractured memories in the story needed to find a different circuitry.

Assayas: You are disturbing the logic of how a film has to be made because you have an intuitive knowledge of what it is, of what it should be. This film is adapted from a book you love, which is an excellent starting point. At the same time, it’s a self-portrait. I think it’s very close to the bone.

Stewart: I just wanted to be the person who got the ball rolling. I’m a really good follower. I’m such a faithful soldier, but it’s really fun to lead the charge. I thought this book really lent itself to adaptation because it lacks any kind of structure that makes it easy to digest or palatable. I was like, This feels so much more like a whole life, a DMT trip, or a dreamy recollection. This is a film about one person—but that doesn’t mean it was easy to make. We draw ourselves every single day. Sometimes that self-portrait’s hideous, disgusting, self-hating, lacerating. Other times, it’s cool. To attempt to say something true about yourself or a character is such a slippy, squirrely thing. Making movies is inherently embarrassing because it’s egotistical.

Assayas: I see it as a privilege. It’s about understanding the world in ways that are not open to everybody. You have to be constantly aware of that, and you must be up to the task.

Stewart: Which is why women don’t normally do it—we are not trained to accept that. It’s not our first instinct to fill that role. It’s audacious. That’s what the book’s about, too—her finding her voice. If it feels like a self-portrait it’s because, look, I’m 35 years old. I’ve wanted to make movies since I was 9. Why the fuck did it take me so long?

Assayas: Ultimately, it was an epic. It was a fight. It was a war. And you won the war.

Stewart: It’s just a way of relating to reality. It’s not fundable entertainment industry fare. The script was very hard to read. I guess now that I’ve done it—not to sound too dramatic or self-aggrandizing, but against all odds—there is the feeling that execution is inevitable. I’m not gonna sit around and wait for someone to pay for my movies ever again. I’ll just do them for fucking nothing. I will steal them. I will not wait another eight years to make a movie. I will just operate in Europe in complete liberated isolation, and then hope that some American distributor will buy it after we make it. Independent cinema in America is a farce. People are going to fucking quote that all over the Internet, but it’s true. I apparently make independent movies, and it’s like, barely.

Assayas: I wrote to you after watching the film. I was just so happy for you because I felt that you had the fight of your life and you won. It reminded me of how I started making movies. My first screenplay was not as abstract as the movie you made, but it was daring for the times. I remember a producer who told me, “You know what? I’m producing a film by Alain Resnais, the famous French filmmaker, and I’ll give you the crew. You will have an experienced crew that will guide you.” I wanted to make that movie with the guys I’d been working with when I made my short films, who were my age, who shared my taste. The foundational decision I made as a filmmaker was not to go with the seasoned professionals, but to trust the kids I’d started with. Sometimes, a film crew can be like a punk band.

Stewart: I’ve seen you talk about that first movie, and it genuinely encouraged me to avoid “studio musician” engineers that have been suggested to me. The times when the movie found itself about to fall apart were when people who were overly experienced were sinking the ship, and they needed to be removed. Our producers were not confident, thrilled, or happy with me at all.

Assayas: When you want to break the mold, when you want to make movies that open doors for yourself and for other people, it’s going to be tough. No one understands where you’re heading—not because you are so far ahead, but because you are somewhere else. What do you think art can do?

Stewart: It can make the world a much bigger or smaller place. We make art to get closer to each other, but at the same time, when you make really good art, the vacuous spaces that you find yourself inhabiting as an actual human become immense. What can art do? I don’t know. Keep a lot of people from offing themselves?

Assayas: I think art is a disease. You’re born with it, you know? I need to have my back to the wall to be able to make anything, because it comes from insecurities. When you’re acting, writing, or directing—there is pain. You deal with the pain, and art is the result. You also have to protect it—from the industry, from the boredom of modern droning. Movies are living proof that at least there’s one kind of art that can reach the mainstream. I started as a painter, a clumsy painter, but a painter. I dropped the idea of being a painter because I knew I would never connect with my times, whereas the power of movies is the fact that you can communicate with more people. Art is about proving that it can be done.

You can purchase a copy of the Artists on Artists issue, featuring this conversation and many more, here.

Makeup by Jillian Dempsey

Hair by Bobby Eliot

Project Management by Chloe Kerins

Photography Assistance by Dan Patrick

On-Set Styling Assistance by Kat Cook

Styling Assistance by Andrii Panasiuk 

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Kristen on the cover of Les Inrocks (France) Cannes Film Festival Issue

 

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Kristen Stewart returns to the Cannes Film Festival this year as a director to present her first feature film, “The Chronology of Water.”

At the Cannes Film Festival, Kristen Stewart presented her directorial debut, the adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch's memoir, The Chronology of Water , in the Un Certain Regard category ( read our review here ). We spoke with the new filmmaker about feminism, violence, and beauty.

During the presentation of the film, you emphasized the impact that The Chronology of Water will have on our bodies.

Having a female body is a political act, a radical act. It takes real energy to keep getting back up. It might sound dramatic, but it's the truth. It's okay to rely on hyperbole here. The only reason we don't is because no one wants to hear it. It would be disgusting. But we can make it fun. The film deals with a very difficult subject, and our goal was to give ourselves an electric shock and laugh hysterically. The last time I saw the film, there was deathly silence in the theater. And I was like, "But wait, this is funny!"

There are so many things about this film that I find funny and exciting. I was a little worried people wouldn't understand... The goal was to listen to our feelings, our impressions, and let them guide us into unknown territories. When I watch Imogen Poots ejaculate against her childhood bedroom door, I could fly. I can't believe we did that.

How did you discover this text by Lidia Yuknavitch?

I read it when I was 25, maybe 26. I already had a long career behind me. People were asking me questions. I had platforms to speak. But I was starting to feel like I hadn't said much, that I hadn't been very honest, even though I am honest, sometimes excessively so. There are topics that seem steeped in shame, that you're not supposed to articulate.

There's this scene in the film where Lidia Yuknavitch (Imogen Poots) reads from her book on stage in public. She can barely speak. Her voice comes out in writing. She can't externalize it. It's a very internal thing. She says it started to piss her off that she had a hole. Suddenly, she realizes she's saying it in front of an audience. She catches herself, swallows her anger. If you say things too brutally, people don't listen. The idea was to make it beautiful. Some violent things can be beautiful.

The fault line between pain and pleasure is blatant. It's okay that bad things have happened to you. You have to recategorize them, reclaim them through words. It's de-stigmatizing. Everyone has had disgusting sexual experiences—even if you haven't been abused in that way, even if you haven't had an experience of violence, as a woman, as a queer person, rape is endless, it happens daily. It creeps into the images we consume, into media conversations, into our oppressive patriarchal society. I say that and people say, oh, more feminist bullshit! It feels good to find a way to get up, set your hair on fire, take all your clothes off, come really hard in public, and say, “Look, this is actually cool!” For my first film, I thought that's what I had to do.

You use a lot of cut-ups; the editing of your film is very fragmented. Is this something that comes from the book by Lidia Yuknavitch that you're adapting, or something you came up with yourself?

The book is an experience of broken pieces being reassembled. It's an incredible emotional mosaic. It's funny because that's what movies do. Movies can be like dreams; they're the only format that does that. Making a film from this book was very satisfying because it's one of my favorite texts. It's an active work, which made me understand that it's okay to explore yourself, to explore others, and to do it loudly. It's healthy. It's stifling to live in a woman's body and have your inner voice constantly told to shut up. I know how it feels. We all have physical memories that come up every day like flashes.

When you read what people say about the book, it's often diminished. What happened to her? Oh, she was sexually abused by her father and found an outlet through swimming and literature. That's not what it's about. It's about what happens to all of us and how we categorize that pain. How we can reframe it, relabel it through the words we say to ourselves and others in order to transform that pain into pleasure. All our desires are completely bastilled from a very young age. Women don't decide what they like. It's imposed on us. So you have to understand why these mechanisms are there and reclaim them. Otherwise, you're screwed.

The Chronology Of Water  by Kristen Stewart with Imogen Poots, Thora Birch, James Belushi – Un Certain Regard – with the support of Chanel

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Kristen on the cover of Porter Magazine - May 2024

 

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She first shot to fame as a child actor, before solidifying her status on the global stage at the age of 18, in one of the highest-grossing movie franchises of all time – the Twilight Saga. Now 34, actor KRISTEN STEWART talks to BILLIE JD PORTER about her electrifying new movie, Love Lies Bleeding, defying Hollywood, and why she’s feeling happier than ever.

On a sun-drenched afternoon in Los Angeles, Kristen Stewart is winding down her latest press tour. We’re in her home office, nestled on a hillside in the Los Feliz neighborhood, overlooking far-reaching views of the city. After a whirlwind first quarter of 2024, this time marks the end of one chapter for Stewart, before her next is written.

Since premiering at the Sundance Film Festival at the beginning of the year, Love Lies Bleeding, the sophomore feature from writer-director Rose Glass, has gripped audiences and critics alike, due in large part to Stewart’s spellbinding portrayal of Lou – a seemingly nihilistic gym manager, whose world is turned upside down when she falls hard and fast for a female bodybuilder.

“I think we were shocked that we could even get this made,” she tells me, as we make our way to her back porch. “Because it's so weird. It’s violent and kind of irredeemable at times, but it makes you look; it’s scary. It’s confronting.”

To box the film into any one of the categories it’s been labeled thus far – action, thriller, romance, mystery, neo-noir – feels reductive. Glass has cited both Showgirls and Saturday Night Fever as influences, while one Letterboxd review calls it, “True Romance for the gays.” Somehow, Love Lies Bleeding invokes the spirit of all these legendary titles, yet is at once in a league of its own: a bold, genre-bending fever dream that oozes sex, vulnerability and surrealism simultaneously.

In amongst this chaos, Stewart’s performance strikes a delicate subtlety, that leaves you moved to tears in one moment, and laughter the next. “I kind of feel like, in the most dramatic moments of your life, it does get hilarious… It’s an odd mix of tones,” she says. “That’s why Rose is so fucking good. You’d think that would be clunky.”

There’s an almost childlike effervescence to the way Stewart speaks about working with Glass, becoming so animated at times that she lifts up from her seat, excitedly remarking at the filmmaker’s fearlessness, her character design, and her flat-out rejection of the “prescriptive bullshit” that many industry executives have come to expect from female-perspective art. “I’m so in awe of her… and it’s been really inspiring. But, at the same time I’m, like, Whew, I am so not there yet.”

Only time will tell. When we meet, Stewart is relishing the last two weeks of calm, before embarking on what is set to be a career-defining project of her own; directing her first feature. The film is based on The Chronology of Water – a piercing 2011 memoir by American writer Lidia Yuknavitch that explores her experiences of addiction, childhood sexual abuse, and ultimately finding both writing and competitive swimming as a means of catharsis.

“I’m in what they call, ‘soft prep’, which sounds kind of weird,” Stewart says. “It’s the dreamy place that you get to live in before you actually have your crew at your disposal.” To some degree, this soft prep has been in motion for over seven years. After gaining rights to the material, she first announced the project at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, before going on to attach British actor Imogen Poots to play the lead. But the journey to bring the project into fruition hasn’t been easy; Stewart has been vocal about her plight in financing the picture as recently as this year, having stated in January that she would quit acting until she could get the film over the line.

“It’s kind of a self-conscious thing to talk about, because it’s hard to get anything made. You know, [a film] that’s not regurgitating something that’s pretty standardized,” she muses. “My movie is about incest and periods and a woman violently repossessing her voice and body, and it is, at times, hard to watch… but it’s gonna be a fucking thrill ride. And I think that’s commercial, but I don’t think that I have any gauge on what that means,” she laughs. “I think people would want to see that, but then… I think maybe people wanna watch movies about, like, Jesus and dogs.”

To bring her vision to life, Stewart is taking production for the film to Latvia – rather than in the movie-making bubble of her native Los Angeles, where she lives with her fiancée, the screenwriter Dylan Meyer. It’s a decision which she tells me is empowering her to have the freedom she needs for a truly explorative process. The small, northern-European country will be playing backdrop to scenes in New York, San Diego, Florida and the Pacific Northwest, spanning three decades of the story. “It’s a fledgling film culture there. Look, I’m all about the way we make movies here [in the US], but I needed a sort of radical detachment. I am not a director yet. I need to make a student film. I can’t do that here.”

There is a raw, self-effacing candor that emanates from Stewart – a multi-award-winning, Academy Award-nominated actor who has been in the entertainment industry since childhood, and who played the lead in one of the highest-grossing movie franchises in history. Despite her position in Hollywood – across acting, producing, and now directing – she speaks about the machine, that she is unarguably a part of, with a sense of distance and impossibly charming cynicism. As we dig into her decision to hold out as long as she has, to create the art she wants to, her passion for the material itself is clear, but there’s something deeper at play too. Her choices feel like a retaliation against an industry where artists, specifically women, are so often forced to compromise on their instincts to succeed.

“[There’s a] thinking that we can check these little boxes, and then do away with the patriarchy, and how we’re all made of it,” she considers. “It’s easy for them to be like, ‘Look what we’re doing. We’re making Maggie Gyllenhaal’s movie! We’re making Margot Robbie’s movie!’ And you’re like, OK, cool. You’ve chosen four… And I’m in awe of those women, I love those women [but] it feels phony. If we’re congratulating each other for broadening perspective, when we haven’t really done enough, then we stop broadening.”

Two days before we meet, Stewart rang in her 34th birthday, an occasion which she tells me she would not have ordinarily celebrated, if it wasn’t for the encouragement of her loved ones. (Meyer, her partner of five years, shared birthday wishes on Instagram, captioning a Polaroid of Stewart cross-legged on a bed and holding their cat, “I like really really love you and am wishing you a meteor shower of good stuff in the year to come.”) But there is a deep gratitude Stewart feels for this specific time in her life.

“I am very, very happy to be my exact age,” she states, contemplating the ways her creative priorities have shifted over time. “As an actor, I’m called upon to serve other people’s visions. You get greedy; it feels good to be called upon… even if you don’t love the thing. I think it’s nice that, as I’ve gotten older, I would much prefer to tailor my experiences to result-oriented goals, versus, just, ‘This is gonna feel good for me right now.’”

Her contentment also seems anchored in the knowledge that, while her experience as a woman in the public eye has been far from easy, it was a precursor to an era that is even more merciless. “Even if we’re still emotionally violent towards women right now, it’s so much more passive aggressive… [Before] it was just so fucking straight up.”

Stewart is shrewd to the fame game and has found ways to navigate the scrutiny. She’s conflicted about social media, on the one hand labeling it fake and performative. “But then I’m like, that is presumptuous and totally reductive because everything you’re seeing, you can see something true about it.” She only has a secret Instagram account that she keeps private and purely for “selfies with friends”.

But there are public-facing parts of the job she has come to enjoy. Her style in particular has evolved into a distinctively playful mix of casual-meets-luxury, bringing an effortless edge to red-carpet looks. “If [fashion] wasn’t part of the job, I would wear the same thing every day… and I wouldn’t know that part of myself, which is actually kind of fun.”

For the PORTER cover shoot, a few days before our meeting (incidentally, for Twilight fans, on the day of the solar eclipse), Stewart loved collaborating with the team and photographer Zoey Grossman to create a story that she wanted to break the mould. “I’m lucky to have done a lot of photo shoots… but it’s always in some chic, mid-century house, and you’re like, lounging fancily around some domestic environment. The whole idea [with these images] was that we wanted to make them all feel stretched. I just read this story about a housewife who realizes she’s a ghost, and I was like, ‘What if [we pretend] I’ve been in this photo shoot for a hundred years?’ I love working with Zoey. You can really try things and do wild shit.”

As we get ready to say goodbye, I’m struck by the unguardedness with which Stewart has spoken; with no publicist and a palpable aversion to the sycophancy that so many in the industry find themselves slaves to. “I’m embarrassed by anything inauthentic,” she laughs, “But then I’m like, what is ‘authentic’?” From where I’m sitting, it doesn’t seem like she needs to look much further.

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Kristen and Katy O"Brian on the cover of Them for 'Love Lies Bleeding'

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Inside Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian’s Sapphic Fever Dream on Steroids

The stars of Love Lies Bleeding are proving that lesbian film can be shocking, sexy, and strange.

BY WREN SANDERS

PHOTOGRAPHY BY LUKE GILFORD

One winter morning in Altadena, I follow the smell of sweat and the sounds of Kelela into the bedroom of a rented home, where a heap of queers tussle atop a satin-sheeted mattress. Amid the pile are four nonbinary models (names: Rae, Jay, Ray, and Raw), a couple who will spend the afternoon passionately making out, and, at its center, Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian — co-stars of A24’s thriller Love Lies Bleeding — gripping each other with sapphic warmth.

Shoots like these can be fun, but they’re almost never this fun — a sentiment that’s palpable on set, as giggles echo, limbs intertwine, and cover stars prance around in their boxers. Between the playful atmosphere and laid-back styling, Stewart is in her element, a welcome change for the longtime couture muse. “I’ve been wanting to do this photo shoot for the last 15 years,” she beams after wrapping the day.

We’re sitting on a ratty couch in the makeshift music studio of the Altadena home. A thick knob of palo santo burns on a nearby table strewn with discarded joints and empty bottles of Coors Light. Stewart wears a black Dickies bomber and cream-colored Carharts. Sunlight slants through the smoke as she reflects further on the shoot: “It feels a little bit like, duh, but in a way that’s nice and in no way scathing. In a way that [shows how] I have grown into a chiller, more mature place, where I’m not so pissed that this didn’t happen 15 years ago anymore.”

That the 33-year-old former child star would be eager to partake in such a gay tableau at this moment in her career makes sense; after decades of leading Hollywood juggernauts from Twilight to Charlie’s Angels, her recent projects have been defined by creative agency and unruly queer narratives. Today, audiences around the country can catch her as Lou, the elegantly mulleted manager of a seedy gym in Love Lies Bleeding, which opened in theaters nationwide on Friday. Also in the pipeline: the starring role in a genre-spanning portrait of critic Susan Sontag and an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir The Chronology of Water, which will mark her feature directorial debut.

For fans who have been paying attention, Stewart’s upcoming slate is not some sudden swerve. From her work on 2014’s Still Alice to her Oscar-nominated take on Princess Diana in Pablo Larrain’s Spencer, she has long focused on independent cinema. That said, we’ve never seen anything from Stewart quite like Love Lies Bleeding. Sure, there were subtle ripples of queer desire pulsing through her part in Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria. And yes, she even played an out(ish) lesbian in Clea DuVall’s 2020 holiday rom-com, Happiest Season. But there’s a difference between being the “hidden vegetables” of a family-friendly movie designed to promote tolerance, as Stewart now sees the Hulu original, and being the controlling softbutch at the heart of a film that brazenly portrays some of the fucked-up shit real dykes go through.

“The identity was beaten out of my goals there,” she says of Happiest Season. “I was getting so many studio executive notes about my hair and my clothes. I was like, ‘You did read the script. You did hire me. What are we doing here?’ It was fucking annoying.”

She continues, “And it’s fine, because I guess there are ways that you need to shroud things for everyone to easily digest. And I’m down with that. And honestly, fucking hats off to Clea, because I don’t have the patience [to do] that.”

With her latest, there was no shrouding necessary. “It’s pretty fucking sick,” she says with a laugh.

If Love Lies Bleeding represents a kind of breakthrough performance for Stewart, the project represents a more traditional breakout for her co-star, Katy O’Brian, who auditioned for the role of Jackie — her first lead in a feature — after a fan DMed her the casting call on Twitter. “A gay bodybuilder from the Midwest,” read O’Brian, herself a gay former bodybuilder from the Midwest. I’ll die if I don’t get this part, she thought.

In person, the 35-year-old martial artist and Mandalorian actor appears every bit as powerful as Jackie, her biceps ready-made for TikTok thirst. Though unlike her character, whose pyrotechnic rage drives the film, O’Brian is goofy and unguarded — “a little dork,” to use her words.

While eating lunch at a small park in Beverly Hills, she relates her initial impression of the script: “Holy shit.” I can see her eyes widen through the chestnut glass of her aviators as she remembers that mixture of enthusiasm and terror. “I’m shaking as I’m reading,” O’Brian recalls. This is definitely going to be the most challenging role that I’ve ever played.

It would also be the most exciting. “Because [Jackie] was a full character with real stakes and real emotions,” she tells me. “And there were some [sex] scenes, too.”

There sure as hell were. In fact, those deftly realized sequences are part of why Love Lies Bleeding reflects a turning point not only in the careers of its lead actors, but also the landscape of modern sapphic cinema. Arriving at the end of an era almost comically saturated with a certain sort of lesbian narrative — that is, largely tepid, often white, and invariably antiquated — Rose Glass’ propulsive second feature embodies everything that films like these were not. It’s horny, it’s brash, and it’s invested in portraying contemporary queer relationships with all the telltale markings of tenderness and toxicity that make them legibly ours. Only rarely since the Wachowskis’ Bound have onscreen dykes made such a delicious mess. This was the plan all along, the director notes with a wry smile. “There are a lot of very tasteful lesbian period dramas out there,” she tells me over Zoom. “I knew I didn’t want to make that kind of film.”

What she did make is a sapphic fever dream on steroids, a lurid, gloriously gay romp starring a brawny soon-to-be heartthrob and the most recognizable queer actress of her generation.

What would you do for love? Would you run away from home? Would you fight? Would you kill? These questions have inspired scores of romantic thrillers. Lucky for us, Love Lies Bleeding adds some new prompts to the canon, namely: What would you do for sex so good it makes you feel reborn? So validating it replaces the loose ends of a rudderless life with sudden, undeniable purpose? How far would you go for a pious top who worships at your altar? For a switchy princess who makes you feel like a god?

Enter Kristen Stewart’s Lou and Katy O’Brian’s Jackie. Set in a nowhere southwestern town during Reagan’s America, Love Lies Bleeding is at once a revenge story and a refreshingly empathetic depiction of infatuation, one that treats the subject with curiosity rather than as a cautionary tale. Where other films might focus on the tragic consequences of romantic obsession, this one seeks to understand how two characters who barely know each other can take their love to murderous extremes.

“What I love about this movie is that the queerness isn’t the conflict,” says O’Brian. “It’s the type of film that I, as a queer person, would want to watch — to not have drama around my sexuality, and to just admire these two absolutely wacky individuals.”

Our protagonists collide early, when Jackie stops by Lou’s gym on her way to a competition in Vegas. The meeting reads easily as cosmic; time seems to slow as they flirt between the bench presses. For O’Brian, the moment evokes memories of her own first brush with queer attraction. “I had the same experience the first time I saw someone with that kind of androgynous look — someone who wasn’t worried about putting on all the stupid fucking makeup and stuff,” she tells me. “That was my awakening.”

Back in the gym, Jackie gamely pulls down her shorts, offering a cheek to fill with Romanian steroids. “Feel it already?” Lou grins after administering the injection. “Like Popeye and his spinach.” Soon the pair have made it to Lou’s apartment, where they stumble passionately toward a honey-lit bed. What follows is the first in a series of striking love scenes — energetic yet unhurried, earnestly erotic without tipping into sapphic pandering. “Compared to something like The Handmaiden, where you’re watching them go at it and screaming, this is a lot more intimate,” O’Brian observes.

Stewart agrees, noting that what makes the scenes hot is more than a granular attention to physical maneuvering. “It’s not about [showing] simulated sex on film,” she tells me. “I’m so embarrassed by that. I’m so sick of watching it. I’m so sick of doing it.”

The actor is far more interested in the sexual subtext and tacit dialog that fuel onscreen intimacy — “the ways that you let the person you’re with either take over or be consumed,” she explains. “Those were choices, and they were very articulate, yet nonverbal decisions that we made together. And without that dynamic, nobody would have cum. Literally, you could almost take the body out of it. You could tell me the right thing, and that’s what’s going to get me there. Tell me I am something to you. Tell me I can be taller than you, even though I’m 5’5”, and you’re fucking 5’10”, and I’m there.”

Jackie and Lou’s instant attraction is even more remarkable knowing the decidedly unsexy circumstances of their real-life counterparts’ first meeting. This was back in 2022, on a warm spring morning in Los Angeles. Stewart had already been cast and O’Brian was coming by for a chemistry read.

“I never thought I’d meet Kristen Stewart. Then I walked in, and she was just there. I was like, Huh, it’s Kristen Stewart. That’s cool,” O’Brian remembers. Not long after, while another potential Jackie was screaming in the other room, the newcomer decided to introduce herself. “I should just go talk to her and see what the vibe is… [see] if we can do this,” O’Brian tells me. “So I went up to her and said, ‘Hey, I’m Katy. I’m reading for Jackie. And Kristen is just like, No shit.”

So far, it doesn’t sound like the kind of interaction that translates naturally into licking each other’s armpits in front of a director, which at this point is less than an hour away. “I told her, ‘I had a super short drive here, but it felt long because my cat peed in my car, and I can’t get it out,’” O’Brian says. “And that’s how I met Kristen.”

When I ask Stewart about the encounter, she says the actors’ mismatched energies actually positioned them ideally for the roles they played. “The weird interpretations we had of our characters, and what might be happening in a given moment, they were never the same,” she explains. “It was perfect, because they’re obsessed with each other even while they’re [rarely] having the same conversation.”

Some two years and one six-month shoot later, the actors share space easily, at one point draping themselves around each other on a sun-drenched couch. During a break in photography, I pull up a seat. We’re chatting about astrology when O’Brian excavates a frayed notebook from between the cushions. I gulp, noticing the familiar coffee-stained pages. That’s my journal, I tell her, sheepishly.

“Can I take a look?” she grins, aware of how audacious the request is, and yet charmingly unbothered.

“Sure.”

Stewart watches quietly from the other side of the sofa as O’Brian flips, stops, then slowly reads aloud, “Good girl.”

I glance around nervously, flustered by the sudden intimacy. “A line from your movie,” I croak.

Stewart brightens, quickly recognizing the moment — one in which Lou oozes approval as Jackie touches herself. “There’s nothing better than that feeling,” she exclaims, projecting herself into O’Brian’s character. “Tell me I’m doing a good job; God, I’ll do anything.”

Later, Stewart elaborates on the potency that sexual narratives carry: “We’re all in our heads, it’s all fantasy. That doesn’t mean it’s a lie, but we need to believe the stories we hear about ourselves in order to then reckon with a body, put it out in the world, and allow it to be touched in the way you’ve decided feels good.”

The thing is, sometimes the stories we tell to turn ourselves on leave us with pieces missing when morning comes. Jackie and Lou learn this the hard way. About halfway through the film, after a night of bitter fighting and transcendent sex, our lovers wake up to a brutal twist, sending them down a bloody path of retribution.

Contrasting countless timid movies about unrequited yearning, Love Lies Bleeding actually lets its dykes fuck around and find out, subverting what it even means to be a “lesbian” film. “To imply that ‘our’ experience can be in a genre of its own is dangerous. I don’t want to perpetuate that,” says Stewart. “We have so much unearthing to do — so much unabashed self-exploration and self-touch. We need to touch base, dude. It’s the only way to tell stories: from the inside.”

Amid the beauty and chaos of rippling muscles and exploding cars, Glass finds subtle ways to continue the sapphic coding. Notably, as O’Brian points out, Lou pulls up to a crime scene in a curiously specific get-up. “She puts on her murder outfit,” the actor giggles. “She’s got this red jumpsuit with short sleeves. It’s stylish, but a murder cleanup outfit? It’s hilarious.” (I guess if we can have farmers market chic, we can have the perfect little fit to dispose of a dead body.)

In truth, Jackie’s just getting started. Yet even as the film descends deeper into violence, it still traces the textures of codependence woven through relationships we can actually recognize. Yes, the stakes have been played up for dramatic effect. But who among us hasn’t chased the promise of love into the jaws of infatuation?

Back in Altadena, Kristen and I are talking about blood. Specifically, she’s describing the sensory inspiration for her upcoming adaptation of The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch’s stunning exploration of grief, kink, and adolescent ambition.

“I love the book. I love how it’s written — I can smell it. I can feel it pulsing, I can feel it leaking, and that needs to be seen,” she tells me. “The first shot in the movie is just blood seeping out of the body.”

Real blood, the director adds, then wonders aloud: “Do I get her to fill a DivaCup, or do I get a vial of blood from a vein? It needs to be chunky.”

She’s talking about Imogen Poots, who’s set to star in the film. “I’m going to get her blood and my own probably,” Stewart muses.

Using her own body isn’t the only way she seeks to bring herself to the adaptation. In addition to Poots, Stewart sees the rest of the cast being filled out with fellow former child stars — “people that we missed, women that just stopped getting hired because they weren’t ‘the girl’ anymore.”

“Not to say they’re not still around,” she clarifies. “But I want to give really fucking great parts to the people I looked up to when I was little. I want to put [them] in movies.”

For Stewart, stepping behind the camera is a natural transition; after feeling constricted on past sets, she craves creative flow. “Working with a bad director feels like breathing through a straw, like any truth or room to be seen is stifled,” she says. “I feel like I have nowhere else to go. I have to make a movie.”

As the final rays of the afternoon sun fill the room with amber light, our conversation turns to chemistry — the kind that brings people together, that turns us on, that inspires us to grow. I’m thinking specifically of a passage from The Chronology of Water. Opening again the journal O’Brian pulled from the couch cushions, I begin to read: “You will see that you have an underlying tone and plot to your life underneath-”

“-the story that you’ve been told,” Stewart continues, from memory. “Who would have thought of it but you — your ability to metamorphose like organic material in contact with changing elements.”

Many actors wish to be seen as the Platonic ideal of themselves, wax sculptures in the public eye; Stewart is seeking something different: the space to be mutable, to resist the confines of calcified industry expectation. “In a word I’m fucking liquid, man,” she says. It follows that this freedom would lead her to Yuknavitch, whose memoir finds beauty in “repossessing pain, repossessing bad experience, and repossessing narrative.”

“Retelling story is so necessary for survival for anyone who’s had to change the path where they were put,” she continues. “You know what I mean?”

I nod, then ask, “You’re talking about yourself a little bit, right?”

“Absolutely,” she confirms after a pause. “I don’t know who else I’d be talking about.” 

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