Kristen Stewart has reality fright. On-screen, her unleashed energy
captivates and her face offers no unfortunate angles. But off-screen,
her discomfort is palpable. In her endearingly unpolished public
appearances, she fidgets, scratches, runs her fingers through her hair,
and generally bungles her words. (Who can forget her audible throat
clearing at the Academy Awards?) Her awkwardness seems to arise from a
profound distrust of the media, the limelight, and especially of her
considerable recent success as the female lead of the
billion-dollar-grossing
Twilight movie series. Still,
uneasiness this extreme is surprising in an actor, someone who has
signed up for a lifetime of being watched.
Then again,
extreme
also describes the maelstrom into which Stewart and her costars, Robert
Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, have been thrust. Not since the heyday of
the Brat Pack in the 1980s has a constellation of teens incited such
hysteria. “It’s a crazy anomaly, this teen-idol phenomenon. I can’t
think of any like it since the Beatles,” says David Slade, director of
Eclipse, the third installment in
The Twilight Saga,
which arrives in theaters at the end of this month. “We’d be [shooting]
in a remote location, in the middle of a forest,” he continues, “and
fans would be at the side of the road with flowers at five in the
morning.”
Twilight mania is such that even those who haven’t
seen the films, in which Stewart plays Bella Swan, the all-too-human
love interest to Edward Cullen’s blood-starved teenage vampire
(Pattinson), know that “KStew” may or may not be dating “RPattz,” her
consumptive-looking, bushy-browed costar.
Stewart arrives in
the ornate lobby of California’s Four Seasons Hotel Westlake Village, a
venue chosen for its proximity to a middle-class section of the San
Fernando Valley where Stewart was raised, the only girl among a bevy of
brothers. There’s Cameron, her biological brother, who is 24; Taylor,
who is Stewart’s age and was adopted at age 13; and Miles and Obie,
friends of Cameron’s “that we’ve like helped along the way,” she says.
“I’ve always said I’ve had a bunch of brothers because we have a bunch
of boys who are like family.” Cameron is a film grip; her parents, John
and Jules, also work in the industry (Mom is a script supervisor, Dad a
stage manager).
“It’s insane! Once somebody finds out, you have to get the
hell
out of wherever you are,” she says emphatically, attempting to convey
the madness that has become her life. “People freak out. And the
photographers, they’re vicious. They’re mean. They’re like thugs. I
don’t even want to drive around by myself anymore. It’s fucking
dangerous.” It’s a sweltering late-summer afternoon, and Stewart is
dressed entirely in black, from her Joy Division T-shirt to the polish
on her short nails—the usual teenage suit of armor. Her hair is also
black, dyed and chopped into a retro-modern mullet to play Joan Jett in
The Runaways, a film she has just finished shooting. As she
talks, her words tumble out in knots; she edits herself, starts over,
restates her (often wryly funny) point, so that many times it’s made
through the accumulation of half-uttered phrases. She fiddles with the
multiple silver rings (including one made from a spoon handle) on her
skinny fingers. Throughout the interview, she bounces one knee.
Stewart, who turned 20 in April, has worked consistently for the past decade, often in independent films, but she admits the
Twilight frenzy
has taken her by surprise. “Somebody knocked on my hotel room door and
asked for a light, then said that they were a big fan. I was like, ‘Do
you really need me to light your cigarette? How do you know what room
I’m in?’ ” She mourns the loss of her privacy. (“I can’t be by myself,
and I
like being by myself,” she says.) “Who wouldn’t who has a soul?” says Jodie Foster, who starred with an 11-year-old Stewart in
Panic Room.
“It’s a very different time from when I was growing up. We didn’t have
those lenses that were 150 feet long, or maybe we had them, but there
was still a real delineation between the public and the private.”
What’s
mystifying to Stewart—and likely to anyone with either a shred of
empathy or a tendency to clam up in public—is the looking- glass
reality in which her manner, rather than eliciting sympathy or mere
shrugs, has made her a figure of derision. “I think it’s funny that
when I go onstage to accept an award, they think I’m nervous,
uncomfortable, and awkward—and I am—but those are bad words for them,”
Stewart says. She still frets about her MTV Movie Awards appearance
last year, during which she fumbled her award, a carton of golden
popcorn (then blurted, “I was just about as awkward as you thought I
was going to be. Bye!”). “I fucking flung my award on the stage…and I
was like, Everything I just said? Gone. Gone. I might as well have just
erased it. And they were like, ‘I love how she goes up there and tries
to be so serious. She is so pretentious. Why does she always try to
sound so smart when she’s not smart?’ ”
The “they” and “them”
to which Stewart refers, and to which she returns frequently in
conversation, as though to linguistic worry stones, are tabloid
journalists, bloggers, and online commentators. Later, I ask her to
define this “they.” She gives me an isn’t-it-obvious look. “The people
that write shit on the Internet…the professionals that talk bullshit on
TV. Bullshit people.” It’s as if she’s internalized the critical voices
of our tabloid culture, those whose primary aim is to tear down the
idols they themselves have created. But she’s so young and full of
promise, that as you watch her ape her detractors, you find yourself
hoping she’ll survive the celebrity spin cycle.
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