How Kristen Stewart Became a Queer Trailblazer
“I will quit the fucking business.”
Kristen Stewart is jabbing her finger into the couch we’re sharing, speaking with increasing speed and ferocity about what has driven her to this brink. She’s spent five years fruitlessly trying to drum up financing for what she hopes will be her feature directing debut, “The Chronology of Water,” based on the stream-of-consciousness memoir by bisexual author Lidia Yuknavitch. She’s so hacked off about it that she’s about to ruin the furniture.
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“I won’t make a-fucking-nother movie until I make this movie,” she declares. Then she sits back and breaks into nervous laughter. “Can’t wait for my agents to read that.”
Stewart has clearly entered the “fuck it” phase of her career.
Don’t worry: She isn’t going anywhere yet. Next week, Stewart is packing her snow boots for her eighth trek to the Sundance Film Festival, where she’s premiered films from “The Runaways” to “Camp X-Ray.” This year, she’s headlining two movies there — the existential sci-fi romance “Love Me” and the queer crime thriller “Love Lies Bleeding.”
Just sitting with her on this bright December afternoon in Los Angeles, I begin to understand what Stewart’s next phase looks like. Her brown hair frames her head in a brambled mullet, and she’s wearing a simple, careworn gray T-shirt and ripped jeans. She looks butch, comfortable, herself.
To get to this point, Stewart’s weathered more than a decade of unrelenting media scrutiny, first about her straight relationships, then about her gay ones, as she figured out her own identity. She leveraged her global stardom from the “Twilight” franchise not to become a superhero or a lifestyle guru, but to fuel an astonishing run of acclaimed independent films, including “Clouds of Sils Maria,” “Still Alice,” “Certain Women,” “Personal Shopper” and the Princess Diana drama “Spencer,” for which she earned an Oscar nomination.
“Whenever I hear that she’s doing something new, I’m so curious to see what it is, because it’s going to be a movie that hasn’t been made before,” says Clea DuVall, who directed Stewart in one of her only Hollywood films during this period, Hulu’s 2020 release “Happiest Season,” the first lesbian Christmas rom-com backed by a major studio. “She really is so herself. And I think that’s why so many people respond to her the way they do — because she is so authentic.”
Authenticity has always been paramount for Stewart. Her ability to burrow into the truth of whatever scene she’s playing has made her one of the most quirky and compelling actors of her generation, and she’s handled her public life with such endearingly awkward charm, she’s made it all seem effortless. But it wasn’t. “People say to me, ‘Oh, you’ve just so come out of your shell,’” she says. “I’m like, ‘Well, yeah. I’m 33. It was really hard.’”
As she entered her 30s, something profound shifted for Stewart. She’s candid about everything now, from watching herself as an 11-year-old acting opposite Jodie Foster in “Panic Room” to Foster’s public defense of her during her tabloid breakup with Robert Pattinson; from why she came out on “Saturday Night Live” in 2017 to the queer undercurrents of the “Twilight” movies. And while “Love Me” and “Love Lies Bleeding” could scarcely be more different from each other, both movies nurtured her need to explore the edges of her identity.
Those films are Stewart’s 11th and 12th at Sundance; she’s been coming since she was 13. But this time, rather than spend just a few days in Park City, Utah, marching up and down Main Street to a procession of promotional events, Stewart plans to attend the full run of the festival.
“I can go meet fledgling filmmakers and actually experience Sundance the way that it’s talked about — as a breeding ground for connection — and, I don’t know, get drunk and yell at each other, and be like, ‘What did you think of that movie for real? There’s no journalists present,’” she says, then stops to reassure me: “I’m going to be real with you.”
By the time Stewart stepped on the stage of “Saturday Night Live” in February 2017, she’d spent the previous two years trying to convince the press that it was OK to write about her relationships with women, rather than resort to the vexing practice of referring to her girlfriend as her “gal pal.”
“It wasn’t even like I was hiding,” she says. “I was so openly out with my girlfriend for years at that point. I’m like, ‘I’m a pretty knowable person.’”
But even with that posture, the media’s “gal pal” dog whistle triggered a deeper, more painful history of intrusive curiosity about Stewart’s sexual identity. “For so long, I was like, ‘Why are you trying to skewer me? Why are you trying to ruin my life? I’m a kid, and I don’t really know myself well enough yet,’” she says. “The idea of people going, ‘I knew that you were a little queer kid forever.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah? Well, you should honestly have seen me fuck my first boyfriend.’”
It’s worth dwelling on this point: For almost the entire history of Hollywood, queer actors dreaded the public discovering who they really were, and that fear kept the closet door firmly closed. “Because I was gay, I really retreated,” says DuVall, who came out publicly in 2016. “Even doing a teeny tiny movie like [the ’90s lesbian cult favorite] ‘But I’m a Cheerleader,’ people immediately were like, ‘She’s gay, how can we out her?’ I wanted to stay small.”
Stewart, though, went big, with a monologue on “SNL” about how President Donald Trump, in 2012, obsessively tweeted about her relationship with Pattinson. “Donald, if you didn’t like me then, you’re really probably not going to like me now, because I’m hosting ‘SNL’ — and I’m, like, so gay, dude,” she said to wild cheers from the audience.
“It was cool to frame it in a funny context because it could say everything without having to sit down and do an interview,” Stewart says before running through the kind of questions queer actors have had to consider before coming out publicly: “‘So what platform is that going to be on? And who’s going to make money on that? And who’s going to be the person that broke it?’ I broke it, alone.”
A few days later, I mention Stewart’s “SNL” monologue to Foster over the phone, and she lets out a big laugh. “I never knew that,” she says. “What a wonderful, funny, wry, modern way to be honest to the world. That’s just awesome.”
As Stewart talks about her “SNL” experience, I think about how no stars of her age and stature ever came out when I was growing up as a gay kid in the 1980s and ’90s. So to have her professional trajectory not skip a beat feels like real progress.
When I tell her as much, she takes the conversation in an unexpected direction. “Because I’m an actor, I want people to like me, and I want certain parts,” she says. “I have lots of different experiences that shape who I am that are very, very far from binary. But I did get good at the heteronormative quality. I play that role well. It comes from a somewhat real place — it’s not fake. But it’s fucked up that if I was gayer, it wouldn’t be the case.”
I try to clarify what she means: “So your career maybe would have suffered after coming out had you not affected a performative femininity …”
“… that I know works to my advantage,” she admits, nodding. “That’s why I’m fucking stoked about ‘Love Lies Bleeding.’”
The moment Stewart saw Rose Glass’ 2020 debut feature, “Saint Maud” — a psychological thriller about a caretaker whose obsession with saving the soul of her charge takes on a harrowing, hallucinatory fervor — she wanted to get to know the British filmmaker. “I couldn’t believe that a young woman who’d never made a movie made a movie like that,” Stewart says. “Just to be allowed to find a voice in that way is not an easy task, and it was ambitious and funny and scary.”
The actor arranged a meeting during a trip to London, and asked Glass what she was doing next. “She told me that she had a movie about a really strong girl,” Stewart says. “I was like, ‘OK, I guess that’s what we’re supposed to do.’ And she was like, ‘Yeah, but this is different.’”
“Love Lies Bleeding,” which opens in theaters in March, follows Jackie (Katy O’Brian), an aspiring bodybuilder with a killer physique, who catches the eye of Lou (Stewart), a meek, boyish lesbian who looks after the gym where Jackie works out. Their attraction is mutual and immediate — and complicated after Jackie starts working for Lou’s father (Ed Harris), a murderous gun runner.
Glass laughs when asked how Stewart reacted to the script. “She said to me, ‘Sometimes you get offered parts which are kind of like, I don’t know if I can do this one,’” Glass says. “‘When I read your script, I was like, Well, who the fuck else is she going to get to play this?’”
As an actor, Stewart does occupy a category of one: a young queer female movie star whose very presence conjures robust financial support. Glass had big ambitions for her second effort, but it wasn’t until Stewart signed on that “A24 and Film4 suddenly decide they’re trusting you with all this money.”
Stewart had a similar catalytic effect on “Love Me,” which will play in competition at Sundance as it seeks distribution. When first-time writer-directors Andy and Sam Zuchero, a husband-and-wife team, approached her about the film, “she read it in a weekend and immediately got back to us and said, ‘Let’s meet right now,’” Sam says.
“We’ve been pitching this movie about a buoy and a satellite that fall in love, and most people say, ‘A what? A who?’” Andy adds. “But Kristen instantly was just like, ‘Oh cool, like, a post-human love story about transcending forms and loving yourself no matter what shape you are — count me in. Can I be the buoy?’”
Stewart was taken with the film’s look at how a person defines their own identity while contending with how they think they’re expected to behave. The movie opens long after humanity has vacated Earth, and all that’s left are two AIs: a buoy, named Me, created to catalog the ocean, and a satellite, named Iam (played by Steven Yeun), loaded with every last megabyte of recorded history. Eventually, Me and Iam adopt human avatars based on a social media influencer couple (also played by Stewart and Yeun) whose videos Me discovers inside Iam’s mainframe.
As she talks about shooting scenes with Yeun, Stewart begins sheepishly fiddling with her hair. “Steven and I took on very binary roles, which was very surprising with a movie about identity,” she says with a mix of exasperation and wonder at how easily she’d slipped into that “heteronormative quality” once again. “I felt this desperate girl thing so often, and Steven was so pragmatic about everything. I was like, ‘Oh God, biology exists for sure.’”
By sharp contrast, what most interested Stewart in “Love Lies Bleeding” was just how unapologetically queer the movie felt, and how radically different Lou — masculine, scrappy and unmistakably horny — is from all the classically feminine roles that made her career.
“I always wanted Lou to have this moody boyish charm, to be butch and androgynous in a way which not many actors of Kristen’s profile are,” Glass says. “Weirdly, I can’t think of that many roles like this she’s done, and yet to be honest, it feels like it’s maybe a bit closer to who she is.”
It’s hard not to notice how much Stewart brightens as she talks about Lou’s more butch qualities. “There was something about having the things that I have found attractive be really glorified,” she says. “It was really sexy. And I don’t mean from an outsider’s perspective: I felt turned on by it, and it was cool to have people witness that.”
She means that literally: Lou and Jackie have sex multiple times in “Love Lies Bleeding,” including getting it on in Lou’s bathroom in a way that will both thrill and scandalize Sundancers. “They don’t take their clothes off, but this is going to shock people,” she says.
Stewart and Glass believed that the sex in “Love Lies Bleeding” needed to feel real. “All you ever [usually] see is a dress coming up and a head going down under,” Stewart says. “I think even hetero sex on film is so rote. You go, ‘OK, I know what that looks like in movies, that’s what we’ll do,’ because no one actually wants to reveal themselves.”
And that’s precisely what Stewart wanted to do with “Love Lies Bleeding” — reveal more of how she sees herself than she ever has on film.
Before filming started, Stewart visited Glass’ residence in Albuquerque, N.M., with her “friend-slash-hairstylist,” the director says, to begin transforming into Lou. “Her hair was still longish and blond,” Glass adds. “She was just like, ‘Oh, get it off me.’” At one point, Stewart took the scissors and finished off Lou’s hair herself, as her stylist looked on nervously.
“When I watched the movie, I was like, ‘This is really cool to see me look like this again,’” Stewart says. “I haven’t looked like that since ‘Panic Room.’”
For most of her adult life, Stewart had avoided watching the movie that launched her onto the public’s radar. She turned 11 while making the 2002 David Fincher film — playing Foster’s tomboy daughter, who rallies to her aid when their Manhattan townhouse is invaded — and, she says, “Little-kid stuff makes me very embarrassed.”
Recently, though, “Panic Room” happened to be on TV in her home while she was hanging out with friends. “Everyone was like, ‘Come on, this is such a trip, dude. You need to just remember,’” she says, cringing at the memory. She agreed to watch just one scene but wound up sitting for the whole thing, drawn in by Foster’s intensely physical performance and Fincher’s tightly wound direction. It was enough to force Stewart to push past her self-consciousness and really see what so many queer people had sensed about her from the start.
“I was already going like, ‘Don’t fuck with me.’” She starts laughing. “I was gay.”
“Isn’t it interesting?” Foster says about Stewart’s revelation. “There’s so much that you bring to a role that’s conscious, that’s choreographed, that you thought about. And then there are things that you’re working with that are entirely unconscious, that you won’t really understand until years later, or maybe never.”
Foster speaks with me on a December morning from her car “because everyone’s still asleep and every bedroom in the house is taken,” and her perspective on Stewart is similarly conveyed through the lens of maternal warmth and concern. “She feels like a daughter to me,” she says. “I worried that the job would swallow up what was best about her, because I worried about that for myself. There was a sort of unconscious similarity between us. I guess that’s why I’ve always felt so protective of her, because I wanted her to grow into the person she was meant to be.”
In 2012, after paparazzi caught Stewart making out with “Snow White and the Huntsman” director Rupert Sanders while she was still in a relationship with Pattinson, Foster even wrote an op-ed for The Daily Beast defending her.
“It was such a truly kind act,” Stewart says. “I really needed Jodie to unpack that for other people before I could even understand.”
Foster is still frustrated by the uproar. “The whole thing was just stupid,” she says. “When you’re in your 20s, you do all sorts of stupid shit. I felt for her. I wish for her that she had the space and the privacy to be able to explore herself so that she could be a full human being.”
Stewart didn’t let that scandal, as intense as it was in the moment, stifle her. Instead, she grew to fully embrace her queerness in her public life — like bringing her girlfriend, screenwriter Dylan Meyer, to the Oscars in 2022. “It’s not that I wasn’t scared,” Stewart says. “It was just that there was no other way to live.”
She’s even started to recognize that the most ostensibly heterosexual thing she’s done, “Twilight,” has its own queer sparkle. “I can only see it now,” she says. “I don’t think it necessarily started off that way, but I also think that the fact that I was there at all, it was percolating. It’s such a gay movie. I mean, Jesus Christ, Taylor [Lautner] and Rob and me, and it’s so hidden and not OK. I mean, a Mormon woman wrote this book. It’s all about oppression, about wanting what’s going to destroy you. That’s a very Gothic, gay inclination that I love.”
I ask Stewart if she understands how much her decision to come out has also made her a role model for LGBTQ people. She cackles. “Oh, you have no idea,” she says. “Every single woman that I’ve ever met in my whole life who ever kissed a girl in college is like, ‘Yeah, I mean, me too.’ I’m constantly joking with my girlfriend. I’ll be sitting there and be like” — she whispers — “‘She’s gay too. Everyone’s gay.’”
It can be easy to forget just how rare this still is, a giant movie star living such an openly queer life. “It feels like a generational thing, where I’m watching somebody make the leaps that I didn’t think I could ever do,” Foster says.
After fiercely guarding her privacy for decades, Foster came out publicly at the 2013 Golden Globes, and has just now played her first explicitly gay character in the 2023 biopic “Nyad.” Talking about Stewart has put Foster in a reflective mood. As our call is coming to an end, she offers this unprompted insight: “I get a lot of questions about who I was and what I represented in the industry, and was I — I don’t know …” She exhales. “Was I helpful in terms of representation? I’m sure there’s a 12- or 13- or 14-year-old when I was making movies as a young person who said that I had something to offer to them in their life as a queer person. I had to do it my way. I had pioneers to help the way, who I’m grateful for. And now people can be grateful for Kristen for being the pioneer. I’m just — I’m grateful to her.”
This sense of communion with the wider LGBTQ tribe is why Stewart has dedicated herself to embracing the fullness of who she is as a bro-y, butch-y queer woman in her work as an actor and, come hell or high water, a director.
“I was like, ‘I would like to be on that team because we need each other,’” Stewart says. “I didn’t want to be left out anymore. It was this whole world that I didn’t realize I could explore.”
She sighs that signature Kristen Stewart sigh and smiles, ready to embark upon the next chapter of her life — starting at Sundance.
“I want to go make friends,” she says. “I want to be a young filmmaker. I need to find my people.”
Styling: Tara Swennen/With Falcon; Makeup: Jillian Dempsey/ Walter Schupfer; Hair: Adir Abergel/A-Frame Agency; Look 1 (Cover): Outfit: Brunello Cucinelli; Look 2 (white t shirt & boxers): Blazer: Thom Browne; T shirt: Ayr; Shorts: Des Phemmes: Look 3 – (sheer top and slacks): Top: Christopher Esber; Pants: Casablanca: Look 4 (white blouse / white lace skirt & hat): Top: St. John; Skirt: Shushu Tong
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