Transcript
Kristen Stewart seduced the world as the teenage idol Bella wan. But her
emergence into adulthood has been far from fairytale. Christa D' Souza
meets a young woman caught in the middle of a very public scandal.
Photographs by Mario Testino.
It started straightforwardly enough. I was going to LA to interview one
of the biggest stars in the world about her upcoming film. At 22
(British Vogue says '21'), Kristen Stewart had just been listed by
Forbes magazine as the highest paid actress in Hollywood, a wealth
largely due to Twilight, the vampire franchise in which she plays virgin
idol Bella Swan. The quintessential emo, fame for her baity persona
Stewart was second only to Kate Middleton, in terms of public interest,
an interest nurtured by our fascination with her off screen courtship
with co-star Robert Pattinson, which had tantalised the world with it's
are-they, aren't-they narrative for years.
For instance, however, Stewart was promoting a smaller, indie project:
Walter Salles's film adaptation of Jack Kerouac's mostly
autobiographical hipster classic On the Road. The book had been a
passion of hers for years - of course it had! - and she'd lobbied and
lobbied for the part of 16-year-old Marylou (the free spirit based on
Neal Cassady's wife LuAnne, who also enjoyed a love affair with
Kerouac). Marylou was a million miles away from Stewart's neurotic and
clumsy-to-the-point-of-dyspraxic Swan; the perfect breakaway role. Like I
said, it all seemed pretty straightforward.
And so we met on a lovely sunny day at Casita del Campo, a gloomy,
near-empty Mexican restaurant not far from the Los Feliz mansion she
shared with Pattinson. A tiny, intense presence, dressed in faded grey
skinnies, she looked like a little doll as she slid into the booth. She
had personally picked the venue, a) because there were sure to be no "cockroaches" (her word for the paparazzi) lurking in the bushes; and b) because, being a cool Silver Lake chick, she loves Mexican food. "I don't even know, why I'm looking at the menu," she sighed, as she half-heartedly swiped a chip in the salsa. "I already made myself lunch."
With her reputation for bolshiness (all that gurning and insistent
wearing of trainers on the red carpet and so forth), I'd half expected
the meeting to be one of those classic journalistic struggles, but, in
fact, she turned out to be excellent company: interesting, interested,
articulate, funny, easy. She spoke carefully, with precision; a Valley
Girl, sure, with all the "dudes" and the "likes", but an articulate,
measured one. She was especially droll and affectionate about her
upbringing in the San Fernando Valley: how her mother, Jules, a
scriptwriter/artist/"doer to the point of OCDness", has a proper tatoo
sleeve, hair extensions and a dog that's part wolf; how she has
decorated almost every ceiling in the house with one of her crazy Alice
in the Wonderland murals; and how Kristen and her brother Cameron would
come home from school and there Jules might be"ripping out a bathroom"
because she was bored. She joked about how her dad, John (British Vogue
said 'Bill'), a stage manager with waist-length hair, had suddenly
developed a thing for fashionand was "beginning to look like Karl
Lagerfeld". He keeps asking me to get him a Balenciaga man-bag and I
keep saying, 'Dad? Absolutely not!'"
And she was most forthcoming about On the Road, a copy of which
decorated the dashboard of her first car when she was 16. We talked
about how the part was a big departure from anything she had done
previously. For one thing, the was nudity aplenty. In one scene, she,
Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund (who plays Kerouac and Cassady
respectively) attempt a threesome. In another, she gives them hand jobs
simulataneously. But Stewart was up for it all. "Walter made us confident," she said animatedly, but awkward in her desire to make herself clear. "He totally primed us to be in a position to do things. We'd thought about it all so
much that by the time we got to the set the story kind of worked it's
way through us. Like, we were vessels or something. In a way I can't
take credit for any of it."
Said Walter Salles, via email: "I met Kristen in Los Angeles. She
knew On the Road inside out and understood the character better than
anyone I had met up to that point. LuAnne was decades ahead of her time.
She was a free-spirited, non judgemental young woman... but it was
probably very difficult to be in her position in the late Forties, early
Fifties, a constant challenge. Kristen understood this duality the fact
that the exhilarating moments had a painful counterpart."
For some whose reputation is so je m'en fous, Stewart was keen to declare how she had never thought of herself as a rebel at all. She described herself as the kind of kid who got panic attacks about her marks in school, and an adult who "always overthinks the thought... Like how do you think of nothing?" It was, she conjectured, probably why she found the Beat Generation era so seductive. "What
the fuck do I know, but I think that's why the book will always be
relevant. There is always going to be that seam of people who want
things differently to the standardised version. It's not necessarily a
rebellious thing, it's just who they are. That world back then, it just
seems freer to me than anything I could ever touch and I'm fully
nostalgic for it, even though I wasn't even alive then...
"It's the loyalty aspect of it all," she went on in her low, earnest way. "I
love being on the periphery with a group of people who have the same
values that I do. People who don't get off on fame, who just like the
process of making movies and thrive on that, and fuck anybody who doesn't."
When I mentioned her upcoming nuptials with Pattinson (as had been
reported that week in the tabloids, along with designs for the cake, the
dress and details that Katy Perry was to be a bridesmaid), she merely
shrugged her little dolly shoulders with the resignation of one long,
long used to fantastical speculation and sighed. "Hey, they're all
fucking nuts. It changes everyday. This whole, am I fashionable, am I
not? There's never one constant. Of course it's seductive and important,
what people think about you, but you can't pay attention. They can say
what they want..."
They do say what they want. And sometimes you do have to pay
attention. A month later, the same magazines that had described her
"wedding" in such detail published pictures of her embracing not
Pattinson but another man, Rupert Sanders, the British director of Snow
White and the Huntsman, in which Stewart starred. Sanders is married to
the model Liberty Ross, who played Stewart's birth mother in the same
film, and he is 21 years her senior.
A billion Twihard hearts convulsed with grief. The "Robsten" fantasy?
Shattered? Overnight, she was receiving death threats, pilloried as the
most hated homewrecker in Hollywood. Debate rolled and raged about how
long the relationship had been going on. Then came Stewart's almost
implausibly contrite apology: "I'm deeply sorry for the hurt and
embarassment I've caused to those close to me and everyone this has
affected. This momentary indiscretion has jeopardised the most important
thing in my life, the person I love and respect the most: Rob. I love
him, I love him, I'm so sorry." Sanders's even more contrite apology followed soon after.
The truth of it all? In the time since, I've scrolled back through my
tapes and notes to glean clues as to what might have happened and have
found few lightbulb absolutes.
"You know when your blood pressure goes up and you are excited and you literally reach for your heart," Stewart had said at one point over lunch that day, while describing life in general. "That's the reason I wanted to make Snow White. It physically felt like the right thing to do." and to work with the first-time Brit director Supert Sanders? "Omigod," she had said, eyes fluttering skyward, "just, I mean, to die."
Sanders was similarly effusive about her, taking time out to speak to me from his holiday in Hawaii. "She'd burnt her lower pelvis area, quite low doen," he had said of his first impression of the actress. "She
was bandaging a bad burn there, in her very tight jeans, with a Camel
clamped between her teeth. That was my very first image of her. She's
got this masculine edge. She's like this beautiful tomboy or something.
What surprised me most when I met Kristen was how unlike the character
of Bella Swan she was in real life," he added."She was so tough,
so grown up. She was exactly the modern badass version of Snow White
that I was looking for. I wanted that young, spirited, rebellious
warrior, and she epitomised all of that."
"She and Liberty didn't have very many scenes together," he said, when I asked whether she and his wife were friends, "so
they didn't get to know eachother that well. But they definitely have
similarities. There's a look they share. Kristen is almost like royalty
the way she understands what she has to do, in the way that she has
learnt to compartmentalise... Well Lib's quite 'regal' or something as
well."
Royalty, regal, spirited warrior. Stewart is a warrior, of sorts.
Albeit a warrior, as Sanders once put it, with the weight of the world
on her shoulders. She's got that rock'n'roll edge, too, as played to
perfection in her role as Joan Jett in The Runaways. I still have an
image in my mind of her turning up on the Vogue show, requesting vodka
and then downsizing with white wine "because it's still only morning."
But here's the thing, To be 22 and to have assumed that
unbelievable heavy mantle of fame and all that it entails... Might we
not allow her some human error? Might she not be entitled to make some
mistakes as she negotiates her way round a post-Twilight world, a block
of time in her life she has likened to being away at school (both she
and her brother were mostly home-educated).
"I can't be a free spirit," she had said, almost imploringly, at one point when we first met. "Not
in a normal, relatable way anyway. I can't even do my own groceries or
walk through a mall. How could I be? But, at the same time, there are
always different ways I can explore my freedom. My country is definitely
a smaller place to way it was in On the Road, but that doesn't mean the
spirit will ever go away."
The second and last time we met, Stewart and I were taking a
cigarette break on the steps of the Hotel Particulier in Montmartre,
where a dinner was being thrown in honor of her and Nicholas Ghesquire.
It was about a week after our first meeting and she was as disarmingly
friendly and chatty as ever. As the face of the new Balenciaga
fragrance, Florabotanica, Stewart was very much on show, in a baby-blue
silk corset dress from the latest collection and high, patent ankle
boots. Earlier, Ghesquire had told me how he adored her ability to
subvert the red carpet tradition; he loved the way she was such a symbol
of "tetchy youthfulness" and what fun she was to collaborate with on
different looks.
Stewart had just returned from Sydney with Sanders and her Snow White
co-star Chris Hemsworth on her last leg of the film's promotional tour.
She seemed a little tired (those slight bags under her eyes were a bit
more pronounced, and she seemed almost a little constrained by all her
finery), but - with that cigarette placed behind her back, like she was
behind a bike shed, and a drink in hand - she was in full swing. In
retrospect, perhaps dangerously so.
"My God, I'm so in love with my boyfriend," she suddenly confided, squeezing her fists and stiffening that little body with anticipation. “I wish he was here now. I think I want to have his babies.”
Have I heard her right? Wasn’t her "boyfriend" the one thing she never talked about? To anyone? And yet here we were. “God, I miss him,” she said, raking her hair back and exhaling a plume of smoke.“I
love the way he smells. And him me. Like, he loves to lick under my
armpits. I don't get this obsession with washing the smell off. That
smell of someone you love. Don’t you think it’s the whole point?”
Looking back, the exchange still feels surreal. It took place just three
weeks before those incriminating pictures were allegedly taken. Was she
even talking about Pattinson? Was she having on me? Who knows?
I think back to something she said before in that crazy restaurant about
wanting to be her own person, and not having to conform to
expectations.
"Um, how do I put this perfectly?" she said, so concentrating on getting it out right that her knee started to jiggle. "Look.
I know if you haven't thought about how you want to present a very
packaged idea of yourself then it can seem like you lack ambition. But,
dude, honestly? I can't. People expect it to be easy because there you
are, out there, doing the thing that you want and making lots of money
out of it. But, you know, I'm not that smooth. I can get clumsy around
certain people. Like if I were to sit down and think, 'OK, I'm, really
famous, how am I going to conduct myself in public? I wouldn't know who
that person would be! It would be a lot easier if I could, but I can't."
As we go to press, the story keeps changing, and people's
expectations are shifting daily. The premiere of Breaking Dawn (the
final Twilight intsallment) and its attendant red carpet rounds are yet
to go ahead. Pattinson is said to have moved out of the Los Feliz house
amid fabulous gossip concerning custody of the couple's dog, Bear.
Sanders, slated to make a further Snow White with Stewart, is yet to
confirm his plans. He has not removed his wedding ring.
Work wise, Stewart won the plum role of Peyton Loftis - in the film of
William Styron's 1951 novel Lie Down in Darkness - the one she was
supposed, mistakenly, to be feuding over with Jennifer Lawrence. Then
there is Cali, on which she has her first producing credit.
Professionally speaking, a cynic might wonder, could the current
brouhaha work in her favor?
Again, who knows? One thing, though, is that Stewart did not strike me
as a bad person. Not at all. Just a young, attractive, intelligent woman
trying to navigate her way through the bullshit. So cut her some clack,
OK?
"On the Road" opens on October 12.
Source: RobstenDreams
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