Kristen Stewart certainly made some good money on Twilight, but I’m not sure how great it was for her career. She was consistently booking roles as a supporting actress before that, utilizing her effective, if one-note, broody wounded dove act. And then she sort of got stuck playing the dark queen of heartburn for five straight movies. If she hadn’t been pigeonholed before, that would’ve done it. But not everyone agrees with me – in fact, she still has at least one fan, in “punk legend” Patti Smith (at least, I’ve always heard her called that). Wait, what?
Smith interviewed Stewart in Interview magazine:
SMITH: I loved your work in those [Twilight] films. I thought the commitment of everyone in those films was true. Like The Hunger Games—if you accept the world that you’re entering, and if the people deliver that world, that’s what we’re looking for.
This much I actually agree with. They really go for it in Twilight in a way that they don’t in every movie that tried to copy it. Stephenie Meyer’s inherent crazy is unadulterated by any attempt to please some existing market, which makes Twilight delightfully nutty in a way that a lot of those movies are just kind of dull.
STEWART: Right. I mean, it was a long process, so it’s hard to generalize about it as a whole. It wasn’t entirely cohesive. We ebbed and flowed. I will definitely acknowledge that. But the intention is so f*cking pure in a weird way. Anybody who wants to talk sh*t about Twilight, I completely get it, but there’s something there that I’m endlessly, and to this day, f*cking proud of. My memory of it felt—still feels—really good.
You can read all about this and more in Stewart’s upcoming book, “Swearing Makes It More Earnest: One LA Girl’s Guide To Keeping It, Like, Super F*cking Soulful.”
SMITH: You should be, because you developed a character that people wanted to watch—like your favorite comic-strip heroes or how the March girls grow up in the Little Women books.
STEWART: It’s so ridiculous for me to hear you say that. You know, I’ve done a lot at my age, and thinking about how you hadn’t started getting serious-serious, hadn’t recorded an album at 24 … I read Just Kids and I still have not harnessed something that you wrestled down with serious vengeance. It was just so natural to you, the willingness to allow yourself to explore and create and be free, and not know where you were going. You asked if any of that bullsh*t affects my work, and it doesn’t, but there are other things that affect my quote-unquote “work.” Just Kids made me want—you know, it’s super-romantic and cheesy—but I genuinely started making paintings because of you. I started to believe in other aspects of myself because of that book, because I was like, “F*ck, I should have done this at 17. I should have gotten that feeling.” And one thing that makes me feel completely okay with my lateness is the fact that you are so influenced by other people. You have such a deep love for other people. A lot of artists are such narcissists. It’s very validating and affirming in a way that I really needed. Something happened to me and I became really successful at something at a young age, and that stunts you in every other aspect of your life because you feel like that’s what you’re good at and so that’s what you need to stay in.
You can tell Kristen Stewart was raised around Hollywood people, can’t you? “It’s like, you don’t have to remember what you were trying to say when you started talking, maaan, so long as you stay like really present the whole tiiiime.” What’s the artsy, female actress version of the Existential Buffoon? A Pilates Philosopher? A Doily Lama? Something like that.