Kristen Stewart is in her unapologetically gay era, and we couldn’t be more here for it.
Yes, the actor has been pretty unapologetically gay for years. But a new Variety cover story shows just how much Stewart has abandoned the heteronormative constraints that once defined her career. For starters, she told the publication that Twilight was “such a gay movie.”
“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,” she said. “It’s all about oppression, about wanting what’s going to destroy you. That’s a very Gothic, gay inclination that I love.” Exactly.
That’s also a good description of Love Lies Bleeding, the forthcoming lesbian bodybuilding thriller directed by Rose Glass, also starring Stewart. In the film, she plays Lou, a quiet butch who manages the gym where bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian) works out. Stewart told Variety that the film glorifies “the things that I have found attractive,” and that “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 said. Though she kept her wording vague, Stewart was referring to the sex scenes in the movie, adding that one particular bathroom hookup is “going to shock people.”
Stewart also told Variety that she wanted to “reveal more of how she sees herself than she ever has on film.” When a “friend-slash-hairstylist” was cutting her hair for the role, at one point, the actor took the scissors and finished off the haircut herself. She told the magazine, “When I watched the movie, I was like, ‘This is really cool to see me look like this again,’” noting that she hadn’t “looked like that” since 2002’s Panic Room.
Although Stewart is definitely giving off baby dyke vibes in that movie, she also shared her complicated feelings about the intense speculation about her sexuality with Variety. “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 said. “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.’”
Of course, Stewart officially “came out” on Saturday Night Live in 2017, although as she herself noted, “It wasn’t even like I was hiding,” as she had been out with her girlfriend “for years at that point.”
“It was cool to frame it in a funny context because it could say everything without having to sit down and do an interview,” she told Variety of the viral SNL moment. “‘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.” As if her SNL monologue could get any more iconic.
Love Lies Bleeding premieres at the Sundance Film Festival next week, and will hit theaters on March 8.
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