She talks about Mickey Moore, her
mother’s mentor. He was a godfather fig-
ure who worked with Cecil B. DeMille on
The Ten Commandments and John Stur-
ges on Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and
did several Elvis Presley musical films.
Moore was too old to truly participate in
Stewart’s life, but his Hollywood hered-
ity (an entire basement of memorabilia)
functions as Stewart’s personal folklore.
The making of movies—freed of glitz—
runs deep with her.
“I hung out with my parents on set
when I was little and asked [them] if I
could start auditioning for shit because
I saw other kids on set. I didn’t even
want to be an actor. I just wanted to be
there,” she says. “I was sprinting away
from academia. Yet, I’m so intrigued by
it. I revere it. I’m almost 30, I feel like a
kid. I didn’t go to school. I have a huge
chip on my shoulder.”
She reveres a set just as much, though.
Over the phone, the director Olivier
Assayas—who refers to Stewart as his
“soul sister” and who worked with her
on Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), for which
Stewart received a César award (the first
American actress ever), and the super-
natural thriller, Personal Shopper (2016)—
references her facility on set as a star who
hangs out, who sits on an apple box and
starts up conversations with the crew.
“It really struck me one day. I had a
problem: The film was too long. At some
point I said, ‘Why don’t we just simplify
the credits. The credits are so full of peo-
ple. No one ever reads those credits,’”
recalls Assayas. “And instantly, Kristen
was angry with me. She said, ‘What do you
mean? It means the world to those guys.
It’s so important for them. For you, it’s a
tiny second. For them, it’s vital.’”
When Stewart was 11, she costarred
opposite Jodie Foster, playing her daugh-
ter in David Fincher’s thriller Panic
Room. It’s an intense part that tests the
audience’s stamina for suspense. It
succeeds because Stewart, like Foster,
developed a talent early on for going easy
on sensation. Alarm, anger, pure fright:
She abbreviates them.
Later, Stewart joined Jesse Eisenberg
in Adventureland (whom she worked with
again in American Ultra and Café Society),
which ultimately lead to her being cast
as Bella Swan in Twilight, the vampire-
romance franchise that launched Stewart
into the stratosphere—and shitstorm—of
superstardom. Thanks to a generation of
“Twi-hards” who came of age on social
media during those five films, who made
sport of obsessing over her concurrent
relationship with costar Robert Pattin-
son, Stewart’s private life developed into
a tabloid spectacle. That same feverish
interest still thrives. In 2017 Stewart host-
ed Saturday Night Live, and in her open-
ing monologue, while recounting the 11
separate times Donald Trump tweeted
about her—all related to her breakup with
Pattinson—she goes, “And Donald, if you
didn’t like me then, you’re probably not
going to like me now, ’cause I’m hosting
SNL and I’m, like, sooo gay, dude.”
Inquiring about Stewart’s dating life—
she is once again seeing her ex-girlfriend,
the New Zealand model Stella Maxwell,
who attended the Vanity Fair shoot with
her—is futile. Stewart remains smart (and
funny) about protecting her privacy. I ask
her what she seeks out. She answers, “I
only date people who complement me.”
The impact of that confining period in
her life is still receding. It was when Stew-
art started working with independent
directors like Kelly Reichardt and Assayas
that her work cracked open. “It gave me a
chance to not weigh something down. It
was so much bigger than me. My baggage
was so minuscule in comparison to what
[Reichardt’s and Assayas’s] story lines are,
as filmmakers. I was finally given a chance
to be looked at, not as this thing in this
celebrity-obsessed culture that was like,
‘Oh, that’s the girl from Twilight.’”
Does she feel the impact of those mis-
understandings, or has she moved on? “I
think I’ve grown out of this, but I used to
be really frustrated that because I didn’t
leap willingly into being at the center
of a certain amount of attention, that it
seemed like I was an asshole. I am in no
way rebellious. I am in no way contrarian.
I just want people to like me.”
N
ext year, Stewart will embark
on adapting for the screen
Lidia Yuknavitch’s book The
Chronology of Water. The
memoir, an account of gender, sexual-
ity, violence, and the body, went as viral
as a book can go after it was published
in 2011, picking up a cultish readership
and eventually finding its way into the
recommended reading Stewart’s Kindle
offered her. With this film, Stewart will
be making her feature-length directorial
debut, having premiered a short, Come
Swim, in 2017. Listening to her speak
“I’m almost
30, I feel like
a kid.
I didn’t go
to school.
I have a huge
chip on
my shoulder.”
SEPTEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR 61
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