It is a humid dusk in midtown Atlanta, and Kristen Stewart
is perched on a too-tall bar stool at Saltwood Charcuterie & Bar in the
Loews Hotel, her petite legs swinging free as she talks about girl prison. Not a
literal Orange is the New Black penitentiary – more the psychological and
social incarceration all women feel at various points in their lives, when we
are expected to smile, please, endure, accept, be grateful, acquiesce,
apologize, bend over, be happy.
Stewart, 25, knows all about girl prison: how a woman can be
punished for not falling in line, for not reflecting what the culture deems she
should, for not being , “I believe the operative words are, accessible, easy
and uncomplicated,” she says with an exaggerated roll of her eyes.
Stewart, in town filming Ang Lee’s military drama Billy Lynn’s
Long Halftime Walk, is not, and has never been, any of those things. She spent
years being taken to task for striking doleful poses on the red carpet, or not
shining in talk-show settings, or daring to have desires beyond those the
public prescribed to her because they believed they had the right to shape her
persona since she was a young girl in a series of blockbuster films based on
best-selling books. Finally, she decided to embrace the rebel labels thrown her
way and say, “Fuck it all!”
“I lit my universe on fire”, she admits with a sly smile, “and
I watched it burn”. Stewart drops her head, tugs at the hem of her simple black
sweatshirt.Fans away a mosquito. Yanks a fallen tube sock from its cotton pool
in her Converse sneaker. “Speaking very candidly”, she says at last, lifting
her chin and swallowing a gulp of her vodka tonic, “it was a really traumatic
period in my early 20’s that kick-started something in me that was a bit more,”
she pauses, then settles on the word, “feral.”
She opts not to elaborate, and she needn’t bother. Public
scrutiny of her personal life is unrelenting, the details unpacked and pecked
over in the media like so much birdseed. At its height, when the tabloids
wreaked particular havoc on her longtime relationship in 2012, she issued a
heartfelt mea culpa, but falling on her
sword did little to placate the masses, and Stewart seems unlikely to go that
route in the future. “Women are always saying they are sorry. I do it all the
time. We have that nnate desire to please,” she says.
Just as in the Amy Schumer skit where an assembled panel of
female geniuses do nothing but apologize for their every breath, Stewart
understands the tug of wanting to seem generous even as it hastens your own
abnegation.
“It’s weird because that instinct is what makes us awesome
and admirable,” she explains. “Women hold us all together. But it sucks that
what makes us worth our weight is what gets n our way” She sighs. “Lately, I’ve
been doing less of the [ assumes whiny cry voice] “I’m sooooo sorry.” And more
of the [ drops several octaves] “No. Fuck. Jesus.”
Stewart takes another swig of her cocktail, the liberation
of leaving her old self behind a heady thing to contemplate. The public kind of
burned me at the stake,” she says. “But that’s OK, I can take it. I’m not dead”
The actress grew up in the heart of Woodland Hills,
California, with free-spirited parents in the business ( her father is a stage
manager and producer, her mother is a script supervisor and director) and three
brothes. She was fiercely competitive even as a child, gravitating toward
track, soccer, basketball – any outlet for the “kinetic energy I’ve had most of
my life.”
She recalls an incident in middle school when her coiled physicality
served her well. “There was this girl, and she would do this thing where she
would grab girls by their hair and flip them. This one time, she was totally
approaching our group and I was like, ‘NO! You wanna fucking do this?’
Thinking, I’m never going to be able to back this up.” Stewart laughs. “I was a
midget. I had short man’s complex. And I definitely felt I had to protect my
fellow tiny girl who didn’t have as much punch as me. But actually, it did end
things.”
A self-described tomboy through middle school, the
fresh-faced, fashion-ambivalent Stewart struggled after she turned 13 and “all
of a sudden, it wasn’t cool to be one of the boys anymore.” She’s never
forgotten a particularly rough adolescent moment when a male friend announced, “loudly,
in front of our whole group, ‘ Kristen’s not a girl. What is she?’ And I just
died. It was a totally clichéd, very real insecure breakdown moment, when I was
like, I fucking hate myself”
Stewart winces at the memory. “So many people say, ‘Oh it
must have been so easy for you.’ You think because I’m an actor that I didn’t
have a normal progression of self-hatred?”
“I HAVE AMAZING RADAR FOR A CERTAIN KIND OF BULLSHIT.”
That same I-hate-myself year, she formally left school to
build her career ( she had started with a nonspeaking TV role at the age of 9),
coming of age before our eyes in films like Panic Room and the Twilight series.
“I was 17 doing Twilight. It was the first time I travelled alone. I was like,
Finally”. She relished the autonomy because she never felt like a kid in the
first place: “When I was younger, I really wanted to be with the adults, to be addressed
as a grown-up. I was the most open, forthcoming, confident little kid. I’m
still trying to get back to that.”
Precocious, she resented any form of coddling. “ I have
always been like, I’m fine, I’m fine, way before I was.” In retrospect, she
might have handled things that bothered her differently. “There were things
that I didn’t tell my mom when I was like 5 that if I had just gone, ‘ I’m so
freaked out about this,’ she could’ve been like, ‘ Don’t be, that’s not a big
deal.’ And I would’ve been like, ‘ Oh, gotcha.’ I’m gonna be urging my kids, ‘Tell
me what happened, talk to me.’ Knoowing that there could be one thing that I
could so easily take care of for them but they just need to tell you.”
Through her “ goal was never to be hugely successful in
terms of money and recognition,” her teenage work cannon-shot Stewart on the
A-list. With global success and exposure came a whole new level of bullying and
shaming.
“When I first met Kristen, we were doing New Moon,” recalls
actress Dakota Fanning, who also played musician Cherie Currie to Stewart’s
Joan Jett in 2010’s The Runaways. “Everyone gets picked on and misunderstood.
But it’s on such a big scale with Kristen. Back then, it was perceived that she
didn’t care. But knowing her, I knew she cared so much. It upset her, people
thinking they new who she was.”
“Between ages 15 and 20, it was really intense,” Stewart
seconds. “I was constantly anxious. I was kind of a control freak. If I didn’t
know how something was going to turn out, I would make myself ill, or just be
locked up or inhbited in a way that was really debilitating.”
She utters the last word with exasperation and explains she
is only just now, after 16 years in the business, learning to manage the
speding train of her brain, to erect healthy emotional boundaries, to know what
she doesn’t know.
“At one point, you just let go and give yourself to your
life. I have finally managed that and I get so much more out of life,” she
says. “I’ve lived hard for such a young person, and I’ve done that to myself –
but I’ve come out the other ends not hardened but strong. I have an ability to persevere that I didn’t
have before. It’s like when you fall on your face so hard.” She claps her hands
together. Smack! “And the next time, you’re like, Yeah, so? I’ve fallen on my
face before.”
“The thing about Kristen is, whatever she does, she lives
it, eats it, sleeps it,” explains Fanning. “It’s never, ‘Oh, that might be
cool.’ She is all in.”
With her latest film, this month’s American Ultra, a
cartoon- violent stoner crime caper directed by Nima Nourizadeh ( Project X)
and costarring Jesse Eisenberg, Stewart brings her trademark intensity to
comedy for the first time. She’s not worried about being funny so much as
celebrating that “ this is the first film that I’ve done in a long time that’s
just fucking fun.”
Eisenberg has known Stewart since she was 17, when the two
were cast in 2009’s theme-park dramedy Adventureland. “Kristen is more
self-aware that most people you’ll meet, regardless of age,” he says. “She’s in
a profession where you are made to question yourself, women more than men. She’s
always been very intuitive. We share dismissal of pretentiousness. And we both
take what we do very seriously.”
Those she is trying to wean gratuitous drama from her world,
Stewart hasn’t entirely abandoned her emo underbelly. She still reads and
writes poetry. She still weeps when she listens to Van Morrison. “I used to be embarrassed
about how I cry all the time,” she says. “Now I think it’s a gift to feel
things.”
While it still irks her to be misunderstood – “I’m always
saying shit I don’t mean. Like, Oh, God, that came out wrong. That sounded dumb”
– Stewart has reached a sort of peace with her public image. More critically,
she has reached a peace with herself.
“I needed to be slapped down few times to learn that lesson.
But I wouldn’t trade it, to be honest,” she says, smiling. “I’m really proud
that I am able to move forward and not fall into every mental crater. That’s a
new thing for me. Age has made me smarter and calmer. And it’s fucking awesome.”
Her dinner finished, Stewart gazes at the Atlanta skyline.
She flicks her current wave, sewn in for Billy Lynn, off her forehead with some
annoyance. In the film, based on the novel by Ben Fountain, she plays the
sister of Iraq veteran Billy Lynn ( newcomer Joe Alwyn), who’s on a victory
tour back home in Texas.
“I cut my hair off when I turned 23,” she says. “The effect
was astounding.” When asked to elaborate, her words can’t come quickly enough. “My
hair was such a crutch. I looked quote unquote ‘sexy’ no matter what. I could
hide behind it. As soon as I didn’t have all that hair, I had to let my face
hang out. I felt more confident than I had in a really long time. And it felt
really good. I t was like not having your Iphone for a couple months. It was
the same feeling of release. It sounds so obvious, but it’s like the hair
really did make me feel like a ‘ real girl.’ Like I’m pretty, I’m feminine. I
don’t know why I valued that so much, as if that’s something to prove.”
Stewart takes a fortifying breath, presses on. “Every single
guy in my life, men that I respect,” she says, pointing to her extensions, “are
telling me, ‘God, Kristen, you look great right now.’ It’s like, Wow.
“Maybe to most people long hair is prettier,” she concedes. “But
then what? Is your main goal in life to be desired? That is boring as fuck.”
It’s getting late and Stewart has an early call in the
morning. And she slides off her bar stool, a palmetto bug skitters past her
heel. She jolts, then peers at the thumb-long insect, tilting her head for
closer inspection. “We don’t get roaches that big in California,” she marvels.
A waitress approaches and inquires if Stewart is going to “stomp it dead?”
“Oh, no,” Stewart gasps, brow knit. “I mean, why would I?”
Instead, she gently brushes it to the side with the toe of her shoe. Then she
straightens and strides past, not bothering to look behind her.
Choice words:
On Responsibilities: “My plate is never clear. I do like
pressure. I’m constantly putting myself in just the most unbelievably
uncomfortable situations to see if I can get through them.”
On playing pretend: “I feel like that’s the only way that I’m
good at anything. I’m a pretty good golfer. I just do the best impression of
Tiger Woods that I can, and all of a sudden, my swing is dead straight.”
On the best advice she’s received: “Patti Smith told me to
always take care of my teeth and lungs.”
On her idea oh Hell: “A dinner party with the wrong people.
The airport, which sucks, because it used to be one of my favourite places in
the world to sit and people-watch.”
On songwriting: “I play guitar and the drums, but I haven’t
combined the whole poetry and music thing. I think I’m just intimidated and if
I don’t do something really well, I don’t want to do it.”
On who she envies: “I am so envious of people who
dance. I was in a drag bar in Seoul with
Isabelle Huppert, who danced. I didn’t. And I was like, Get your ass up. Dance.
I just couldn’t.”
No comments:
Post a Comment