Kristen Stewart on fame and why she's only made '5 really good films'
Kristen Stewart's latest cinematic turn, as Princess Diana in the upcoming Spencer, is generating plenty of Oscar buzz, but the actress says in a new interview that only a handful of her films are actually good.
Speaking to the Sunday Times, Stewart opened up about the pressures of fame and how choosing which roles to take can be "a total crapshoot."
The former child actor, whose credits include Panic Room, Twilight and Café Society, added, "I’ve probably made five really good films, out of 45 or 50 films? Ones that I go, ‘Wow, that person made a top-to-bottom beautiful piece of work!’”
When asked for examples of which films she felt hit the mark, Stewart pointed to the work of Olivier Assayas, who directed her in Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper; the former role won her a César, the equivalent of an Oscar in France, a first for an American actress.
“I love Assayas’s movies,” she said, but couldn't immediately name other standouts. "I’d have to look at my credit list. But they are few and far between. That doesn’t mean I regret the experience [of making them]. I’ve only regretted saying yes to a couple of films and not because of the result, but because it wasn’t fun. The worst is when you’re in the middle of something and know that not only is it probably going to be a bad movie, but we’re all bracing until the end.”
She declined to single out any bad experiences.
"No! I’m not a mean person — I’m not going to call people out in public," she said. "But it’s like starting to date someone and going, 'Woah! I don’t know what we’re doing!’ But when you’re in the middle of a movie you can’t just break up.”
It's unclear where her hit vampire teen franchise Twilight falls on that list, though Stewart, 31, did have this to say about the series that made her an international movie star: "If you’d told me we were going to make five Twilights when we did the first? I would not have believed you.”
Stewart also opened up about the expectations and attention that comes with being in the public eye, though she's careful to compare her situation with that of the late Diana.
"I’m not running from anything,” she noted. “The attention is something I can see a parallel in, but the cumulative expectation? Not remotely there.”
At the same time, she knows firsthand what it feels like to live under a microscope.
“It’s feeling constantly watched, no matter what you do," she said. "If you’re in public, someone in the room is looking at you at all times. Even if they’re not, it’s at the back of your mind. That is a feeling you only have if you’re extremely famous. It’s a completely different approach to being a human."
She continued, "It is weird to inhabit a space where people are disappointed in your choices. The world is obsessed with celebrities in a way that’s comparable to how we treated the royal family. People want their idols to be a certain thing, because we want to be good people. We think, ‘If they can’t be good, then how the f*** am I meant to be good?’ But I’m not a figurehead. People choose their role models. But I’m not trying to be one.”
