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November 26, 2009 Edition 1
She might have ousted Miley Cyrus from her position as The World's Most Famous Teen Girl, but Twilight star Kristen Stewart, 19, is in denial.
"People don't really recognise me," she smiles, knowing it sounds unhinged. "I think I just look different in person or something. I'm also not very approachable." She laughs.
Take the outfit she wore to the Teen Choice Awards (where she won Best Actress Drama for Twilight): a Rock & Republic dress, the skirt section of which comprised only silver spikes. It didn't take an expert to deduce the message: "Don't stand so close to me."
Stewart has already earned a reputation in the media for being difficult, but it seems an uncharitable label. In my three meetings with her she has been fidgety, yes, awkward, always, but never rude or arrogant.
"I do feel that nowadays everyone perceives you the same way," she says, pondering a Facebook/Twitter age in which she does not participate. "I prefer something I can touch. But now everybody knows everything about you."
Greg Mottola, best-known for directing 2007's Superbad, wrote and directed Stewart's most recent film, Adventureland (now on DVD), a paean to his own teenage years and one in particular, the summer of 1987, when he worked at a creaky old amusement park. Stewart is the outwardly confident, inwardly tormented teenager Em who forms an unlikely relationship with Jesse Eisenberg's James. Mottola says the girl in his story "needed to be complicated and truly conflicted. We needed an actress who can convey a really believable sense of strength."
Ask her about her approximation of an 80s teenager in Adventureland (she was born in 1990) and she is quick with a response which might look snotty in print but is not delivered that way.
"Well, I've never met a terribly introverted damaged girl at a theme park in the 80s. But I could imagine what it'd be like to not like yourself very much and not have a mum and dad to reassure you and sort of be kicking it alone. To feel like you're sort of smarter than everybody but no one gets it."
Hollywood does get her and doesn't bother that Stewart's awards to date have been voted for by Twilight-obsessed teens and tweens. Variety's review of Adventureland mused "Stewart impresses again" while revered American film critic Roger Ebert noted with a certain gravitas: "Here is an actress ready to do important things."
Certainly Stewart likes the choices afforded her by Twilight and is too smart to complain about any downside.
"It's easier now to do things I really like, like an independent movie that nobody sees. Now it'll be: 'Oh, let's go see Bella in this stripper movie!' It'll be crazy." She laughs like she's loving it. The "stripper movie" in question - Welcome to the Rileys, starring The Sopranos' James Gandolfini - is one she terms the "most fruitful life-changing movie experience I've ever had. It was the hardest subject-matter. I play a very broken young girl working in a strip club."
In another film awaiting release, The Cake Eaters, her character has Friedreich's ataxia. "It's a total deterioration of your muscle control, a very debilitating disease. She's just about to be in a wheelchair and is fighting for that last bit of independence from her mother. It's an optimistic, triumphant story." And next year she will star as Joan Jett in Runaways, based on rock icon Jett's teen girl group.
Stewart started acting at nine and insists there was "never a grand plan", either to pursue a film career or to manage it once begun. Her Australian mother Jules is a script supervisor and her father John a TV producer. When a talent scout spotted Stewart in her school's Christmas play, her parents grimaced.
"My parents were reluctant and I think I just remembered thinking: 'Actually that might be really cool. I might want to go on a few auditions. I might work.'"
She auditioned relentlessly for a year without booking a single job. "It took a really long time until I was totally over it and then came my last audition. I went to it and I didn't even want to. My mum said: 'Well, this is the last one. You don't have to go to any more.' And that was the first movie I got."
The Safety of Objects, released in 2001, starring Glenn Close, made an enormous impression on the nine-year-old. The following year Stewart won the role of Jodie Foster's daughter in Panic Room, which cemented her belief she was doing the right thing.
"Being 10 years old on one of my first movies and spending a month on it with Jodie Foster had an enormous effect on the way I work, probably unbeknownst to me at the time. At least in retrospect, I noticed it. Jodie Foster is the only one who totally shines out in my mind who really taught me a lot."
When she was 12, and working regularly, Stewart left school to be homeschooled by her mother. "I loved it. Independent study is for me." She worked consistently throughout her teens in films from gritty independents like 2004's Undertow opposite Jamie Bell to horror film The Messengers, and then 2007's Into The Wild, Sean Penn's mellifluous film version of Jon Krakauer's profound book about Christopher McCandless.
Now, Stewart - like Robert Pattinson - cannot set foot in public, particularly with Pattinson, without the event being disseminated in its entirety from teen fan-sites to snarky grown-up publications. Do she and Pattinson ever compare notes on the Twilight phenomenon? "The funny thing is we haven't really talked about it. Although we can commiserate and be like, 'ugh, it's crazy'."
Stewart is excited about New Moon, especially her character's progression.
"Over the course of these four movies Bella has to change. I'm not ruining it for anybody in saying that she and Edward end up together. In the first one he's very much a man and she's very much a child so she needs to become a more formidable partner. We're working on that."
The evolution of Kristen Stewart is also a formidable prospect.
- The Independent
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