Now this is the kind of clickbait I can get behind: Kristen Stewart on the cover of Rolling Stone, posing shirtless in a vest and jockstrap—her hand placed suggestively in said jockstrap—accompanied by the headline “Kristen Stewart Uncensored: ‘I Want to Do the Gayest Thing You’ve Ever Seen in Your Life.'”
First of all, the photos accompanying the Rolling Stone interview come pretty close to fulfilling that promise. I MEAN
Apologies to all the famous men the internet has loved before, but Kristen Stewart is daddy now.
Is she allowed to be doing this?!
Okay. OKAY. It takes a few minutes, but once you’ve shoved your eyeballs back in their sockets and stopped shouting “AOOOOGAAH” at the screen, you really should read Alex Morris’ full story on Stewart, which is a fucking great read. Stewart stars in the upcoming A24 thriller Love Lies Bleeding as the manager of a gym who falls for a bodybuilder (played by Katy O’Brian) and then “everyone gets messy,” she says.
It’s hard to choose the best part of Stewart’s interview—her doing endless chin-ups, or drinking beers and playing pool with Morris, or when she says, “Fuck you, bitch!” with regards to Donald Trump—and it’s easy to get lost in the Very Cool details about the house where she works with her fiancée and creative partner Dylan Meyer. (There’s a Playboy pinball machine, for starters.)
But the really good stuff is when Morris gets Stewart talking about gender, identity, and how these concepts are informing her creative decisions. For instance, Stewart recalls her first meeting with Love Lies Bleeding director Rose Glass, who wrote the lead role with Stewart in mind. Glass used the reactions to her first film, the psychological horror-thriller Saint Maud, as a jumping-off point for her follow-up:
Glass explained that her takeaway of what people wanted from her next was a film about a strong woman, a strong lead character.
“What does that mean?” Stewart asks now, narrowing her eyes. “It’s bullshit. It means that we’re not actually letting women define themselves. It’s the assumption that we need to be empowered by the people deciding who gets to have perspective, that we have to provide something aspirational. It’s the lowest-hanging fruit there is.” Glass told her that she had figured out a way to subvert that expectation: She had taken the note literally. “She was like, ‘Strong girl? Bodybuilding. Got it.’ Simple as that.”
Stewart goes on to excitedly describe her character as “the dykey little sister” you’d see in another movie. “That’s never the main character in a movie. That’s never the one that you want to fuck,” she says. “I mean, that’s the one some people do, but not the one that you are prescribed to want to fuck.” She talks about gender theory and misogyny, and describes the vagina thusly: “The coolest fucking part of us is that we have this ever-present and unclosable opening, and we’re walking around with it all the time, and we sort of pretend like it’s not there, but it’s our greatest strength.”
At this point, we’re only about halfway through the Rolling Stone story, and it’s hard to imagine anyone smarter or cooler than Kristen Stewart. That’s a huge 180 from the Twilight years, when most people online posted stupid jokes about her “bad” acting. I simply cannot copy and paste the entire interview—author Alex Morris deserves your clicks, and I would rightfully get sued into oblivion—but I do want to point out this quote, which Morris uses to segue into discussing The Chronology of Water, Stewart’s intended directorial debut:
“The violence and the shame that women internalize and then use as triggers for pleasure? We can’t get away from it,” she says. “To think that we know what we want in a way that’s remotely divorced from the patriarchy is impossible. We will never. And I’m so much more interested in leaning into that versus away.”
Stewart says she’s not interested in taking any more roles—aside from a potential project she’s developing with Meyer—until she gets The Chronology of Water made. Unfortunately, Stewart notes, she’s having a hard time finding financing for her adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel, which she describes as “radical in a million ways.”
Can someone PLEASE give Kristen Stewart the money to make, and I quote, “the gayest thing you’ve ever seen in your life”?
(featured image: Matt Winkelmeyer, Getty Images)
