When it comes to artists and public figures, there are few things more compelling than when the people we thought we knew show us something different. It’s not an easy feat, but Kristen Stewart has managed it more than once.
Her first big shift was professional: Stewart shot to stardom in the late 2000s and early 2010s as an ingénue lead in big-budget Hollywood hits like the five “Twilight” films and “Snow White and the Huntsman.” But by her mid-20s, she largely rejected acting in popcorn movies in favor of subtler and more emotionally varied independent work, including two films with the great French director Olivier Assayas (“Clouds of Sils Maria” from 2014 and “Personal Shopper” from 2016), as well as “Spencer” (2021), for which she earned an Academy Award nomination for her performance as Princess Diana.
She has undergone a pretty profound transformation offscreen too. During her blockbuster days, Stewart, who is now 35, was a frequent target of the tabloid press, both for her relationships — notably with her “Twilight” co-star Robert Pattinson — and also for her often sullen-seeming public appearances. Flash forward to 2025, and Stewart, who publicly came out in 2017 and married the screenwriter and producer Dylan Meyer this year, has harnessed some entirely different energy. She has embraced her status as a millennial queer icon and also come to see promotional duties not merely as a chore to suffer through but, as I think you’ll see from our interview, opportunities for connection and exploration.
Now, Stewart is changing again, directing her first full-length feature, “The Chronology of Water.” The film, which is in select theaters now, is an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name. Imogen Poots stars as Lidia, a competitive swimmer who fights through a series of traumas on her way to becoming the writer she needs to be. It’s a provocative movie — formally and in its subject matter — and one that raises questions about womanhood, sexuality, excess and the stories we choose to tell about ourselves. Those remain questions with which Stewart herself is still eagerly wrestling.
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You’ve been trying to make “The Chronology of Water” for close to 10 years, and it’s a memoir that involves a lot of heavy stuff: addiction, child abuse, the loss of an infant. When you first read the book, what was it about that material that made you feel like this was a story that you had to tell? It was the way that she told it; it was the fact of the telling. There’s an invitation in the text to excavate your own memories. But for me, it’s much less about the things that happened to Lidia and much more about how she reorients those things and writes them down. Just the idea of diaristic writing by women being criticized for being selfish and narcissistic — it’s like, anytime you start talking about yourself, it becomes this tired, pathetic, messy thing. And I wanted to make something tired, pathetic and messy that also felt exuberant and encouraging.
So you’re saying that your interest in the material wasn’t as much about the particulars of Lidia’s experience as it was about the way that her writing invited you to examine the particulars of your own experience. I wonder if you can make that concrete a little — As soon as you start making those things specific, you completely dilute the point. In the beginning of the movie, we show a series of images of a woman bleeding at various times in her life. There’s a way that blood sticks to the grout before it runs down the drain that indicates that it did not come from a laceration or a cut; it came from an orifice. That is a very specific experience, but it is also general enough for everyone to insert their lives into the movie if you are a woman or if you have ever loved a woman or heard her speak about what it feels like to bleed from the place that hurts the most but creates life. So if the question is like, Did I have an abusive relationship with my father? No. Do I resent him when he comments on my appearance? Yes.
This is a naïve question, but why does it take eight years to make a movie like this? It’s not a giant special-effects movie. It doesn’t have a bunch of locations all over the world. I had to do a lot of kicking and screaming. Most of the time it’s difficult to pay for something that doesn’t have an equatable success story, something that makes you go, “This is gonna be great because we’ve seen it before.” But this had to be the first thing I said, because it’s about saying things. It took a long time because it is unsavory, unpalatable, because it’s about violation and repossession — and also how fun it is to watch someone do that, because she is a force. She’s like a tsunami. And also there’s a sexuality in it that feels delicious.
In a way, you’re talking about Lidia’s sense of abandon. That could be sexual abandon, creative abandon, abandon when it comes to drinking or drug use, abandon with relationships. I wonder, given that you’re a public figure, if it’s hard for you to feel abandon? I don’t self-censor. I don’t fixate on how things are going to land on other people, because I’m not smart enough.
You think it’s a matter of intelligence? Some people are mastermind crazy control freaks, and I just don’t have that. I think those people are going to die young. It would take years off your life to try and think in those terms. I’ve been lucky enough that I fell on my face in public. A nice healthy amount of humiliation is really humbling, and it makes you realize: That first scratch? Who cares? After that first scratch, you go: OK, crash the car. We can fix it.
But the way that people who don’t know you have a relationship with you — it’s a very rare mode of human existence. What’s it like? I mean, sometimes you find yourself on something that doesn’t really know what it’s saying. And then the subsequent conversation is confused and ambiguous and becomes very sell-y. It feels like you’re just a capitalist cog, which we all are.
Speak for yourself! Hey, go buy a ticket to “The Chronology of Water”! Recently, I was working with a director that was talking about an actress who was thinking about whether or not they should do a film, and they were like, “Well, I think the market right now is. …” I don’t think I’ve ever said the word “market,” unless I was going to buy some oranges. That is just how I function.
At some point, you became a character in the tabloids, and I was curious about what you learned from seeing this character, Kristen Stewart, out in the world and you know it’s not you. But sometimes it is.
I said that like I know you. I don’t know you. Maybe it was you. You do know me now, and that belongs to you. You can think anything about me that you want. If I’ve ever been frustrated, it’s because they get the wrong information, or you go, That’s not who I think I am. But who you think you are has nothing to do with what other people think you are, and no one’s wrong.
I’m going to go on a slight tangent now. I’ve always been fixated on Marlon Brando’s performance as — Himself?
Yes! But particularly his performance as Superman’s dad in the first “Superman” film. He has to say the word “Krypton” in that movie. I’ve never seen this. Does he say it like “Kryp-tin”?
That’s exactly how he says it. “Kryp-tin.” Oh, God, because he can’t commit to “Krypton”! I can picture this, and I’ve never seen the movie. Poor male actors. It must be so painful.
It must have been hard to be Marlon Brando. But I brought this up with Sean Penn, because he knew Brando, and he suggested that not pronouncing “Krypton” correctly was Brando’s way of retaining some part of himself, even though he was doing a sellout movie. Like, I can take your money, but I’m not giving you my soul. Have you had similar experiences? That kick-started so many things! Performance is inherently vulnerable and therefore quite embarrassing and unmasculine. There’s no bravado in suggesting that you’re a mouthpiece for someone else’s ideas. It’s inherently submissive. Have you ever heard of a female actor that was method?
The only name that comes to mind is a teacher, Stella Adler. Right. Men are aggrandized for retaining self. Brando sounds like a hero, doesn’t he? If a woman did that, it would be different. If you have to do 50 push-ups before your close-up or refuse to say a word a certain way — I mean, Brando, [expletive], I’m not coming for him. [Stewart makes a face like maybe she is.] There’s a common act that happens before the acting happens on set: If they can protrude out of the vulnerability and feel like a gorilla pounding their chest before they cry on camera, it’s a little less embarrassing. It also makes it seem like a magic trick, like it is so impossible to do what you’re doing that nobody else could do it.
It’s also maybe a form of control. Yeah. I think the “Krypton” thing is so defensive. I had a recent conversation that will speak to this. I asked a fellow actor: Have you ever met a female actor that was method and needed to scream and do a whole thing? As soon as I said “male actor, female actor,” the reaction was like, Do not mention the elephant in the room. And he goes, “Oh, actresses are crazy.”
That was his answer? Yeah, absolutely. Then I was like: Hold on a second. You just called me crazy! Cool. So now we’re doing the typical thing where the girl’s crazy, and you didn’t even listen to anything I said?
Let me just scratch my next question: “Why are actresses crazy?” [Laughs.] Oh, man. Love you, bro.
I was going back through your films. You did “Snow White and the Huntsman” the same year [2012] that the last “Twilight” film came out. Both movies did very well, but you didn’t do another big studio film until the “Charlie’s Angels” reboot [in 2019], and you haven’t gone back to that since. I wondered, with “Charlie’s Angels,” did you decide, I am going to try a big studio film again, and it ended up not feeling right? I wanted to help [“Charlie’s Angels” director] Liz Banks do her thing. I guess I was feeling a little optimistic. But I just spiritually and philosophically disagree with the committee process. I think a movie comes from someone’s singularity and perspective and their soul. I hate signing onto something and seeing something with potential life be destroyed. I’m not saying that “Charlie’s Angels” was destroyed. It’s more the day-to-day. I like that movie. I don’t think it’s impossible to make a film that speaks to people, that’s valuable, that feels good and that’s worth paying for under those circumstances. But I don’t have to do it, and so I don’t want to. When I was younger, I was kind of greedy. I was like, maybe I could make that work, maybe that’ll be fun. But it wasn’t. It’s like, I don’t want to not get invited to the party, but then you go to the party and you’re like, this party sucks.
When you referred to the “day-to-day,” what does that mean? Test screenings. Literal on-paper numbered equations that tell you whether or not a joke is funny. Ten people who are over the age of 50 and male weighing in on what my queer character’s hair should look like. Completely sucking out the colloquialism, anything specific. Day to day, you watch something with detail and color become gray. It’s dispiriting. It’s demoralizing. It’s also entirely misogynistic and chauvinistic and not the realm that creates an environment for me to want to be vulnerable in, and that’s my whole job as an actor.
Was there an aspect for you of, like, it’s hard to say no when somebody’s offering you millions of dollars to do something? I’ll be fully transparent: I was such a little guy when I made “Twilight” — I made a lot of money.
You were 17 or something? Yes. I’ve been so lucky to not have to function from a place of creating security for myself, for my family. But I think if that had never happened, I would be scraping the bottom of every barrel to never make another studio movie again.
I could imagine it being completely freeing to not have to worry about money anymore. I could also imagine that sometimes having a wide-open horizon is paralyzing. So what did money change for you in terms of what you wanted to do with the rest of your life? I’m trying to think about when I transitioned into being a real grown-up adult.
It’s still happening. Yeah, truly. If you’ve got a lot of money, you’ve got to give a lot of it away. I know I would be able to make myself happy artistically without it. Also, who knows what the world is going to look like in five, 10 years? We’re in a pivotal nexus, because I think we’re ready for a full system break. I mean that across the board and also specific to the world that I live in, the entertainment industry.
What would a system break look like in the world that you live in? We need to start stealing our movies. I’m so appreciative of every union. Trust me, we would not survive without them. But some of the terms and rules and structures we’ve set up have created unbelievable barriers for artists to express themselves. Without being ungrateful, we need a workaround. Having it be so impossible for people to tell stories is capitalist hell, and it hates women and marginalized voices, and it’s racist. It’s too hard to make movies right now that aren’t blockbuster-y, proven equations. The next movie I want to make, I want to do it for nothing and I want it to be a smash hit. People can think, Of course this psycho is saying that, but I think it’s possible.
Do you think that you, Kristen Stewart, could make a huge hit that’s also the movie that you want to make? It depends on what you mean by huge hit. Marvel is the tent-pole reference for big movies, but pick another one, because I’m not coming for that. But if you do something for nothing and you reach even just a small number of people, that’s enough for me. And also, we could totally make a huge hit! I just realized that your question was like, Do you think that left to your own devices —
I wonder about your sensibility. Totally, my sensibility. Do I think it could land on a large number of people? I think that if people had the cojones to allow one person to lead the charge and they were actually financed and believed in, that people would start going to the movies again. And not just to see “Marvel 10.” “Barbie,” dude!
Did you like “Barbie?” I love that movie.
Can I say one thing about “Barbie,” which I also liked very much? This is a divisive subject.
My one problem with that movie: I took my two daughters to see it. They were 6 and 8. They’re enraptured. And I thought, The takeaway of this movie — even though there are things about it that are subversive and politically and culturally critical — is that Barbie dolls are cool. It’s like, a critique of the thing can still be an advertisement for the thing. Right, right. I think for a woman to be allowed to make a movie of that scale and how physical it was — Greta Gerwig made a world to live in and then she totally took Barbie and broke her into a million pieces. The villains were the Mattel executives! I’m surprised that Mattel let her make that movie. I thought it was so critical of the entire notion of being put into our little boxes. But I hear you. You see a big poster that Margot Robbie’s on and you’re like, Oh my God, that is the picture of beauty. That is perpetuating for sure. It’s complicated, because I completely understand what you’re saying but when I watched the movie, I was stream-crying. Just the fact that she was allowed to do it, the fact she was able to make jokes about Proust in a movie about Barbie, and then Weird Barbie. I love the fact of it. But I hear you.
You know, last night I was reading a book [“The Life You Want”] by this brilliant psychoanalyst and writer named Adam Phillips. In it, he quotes a French philosopher who said that the only modern question is “What is it you don’t want to know about yourself?” What’s your answer to that? I guess I would be really ashamed if all of this working on movies, talking about them, taking pictures, putting on clothes — it’s inherently self-serving. But OK. If there’s something that you don’t want know about yourself, what is it? I don’t know, man. I really hate mean people, and I really don’t think I am one.
But maybe? Sometimes, if I’m feeling threatened, I can be mean.
Were you tiptoeing at the beginning of your answer to acknowledging a selfishness in yourself? Of course. Not tiptoeing. I hope I’m not an egomaniac monster. But I would need more time to think about that. Let’s come back to this one. Do I even really care about people, or is it just that I’m desperate not to be alone? Do you know what I mean? Do I actually care? No, I do though!
Stewart and I spoke again a few days later.
So we ended our last conversation with a big question I took from Adam Phillips’s book. Have you given any more thought to it? Yes! And I’ve asked a lot of other people what their answers would be, and it is confounding. Nobody has one. There are so many ways to interpret what that means. Is there something that you don’t want to find out? Or is it something that you really do know in the depths of yourself but you’re avoiding?
I interpret the question as, What’s the thing about yourself that you don’t want to have to confront? Do you have an answer to this?
I did come up with answers. But do I feel comfortable getting into them with you? You can give me a quickie, just for conversation’s sake. I’m curious. But you don’t have to. I mean, [sarcastically] this is about me.
They’re embarrassing. The first one is such a cliché: Why did I not have the guts to try to be an artist earlier in my life? And then the second one is, there is sometimes a feeling of disdain for my body or my physical appearance. I don’t know what that’s about. So there you go. Right. You were not born with that. That’s a weird, insane thing that you caught out there, like a disease. Trust me, I’m with you. And I can tell you, you’re a cutie pie, so that’s a crock of B.S.
Clip that and put it on social media immediately! [Laughs.]
All right, let’s move on. I was watching another interview you did recently, and at the end, the interviewer asked you for a cultural recommendation that you would give for Hollywood, and you mentioned a film by Barbara Hammer called “Multiple Orgasm.” For people who aren’t familiar with that work, can you explain what it is? It’s an impressionistic, experimental short film by a woman who’s just astoundingly prolific. I saw that movie and was so shocked, because there’s a sequence in my film that is very similar.
You buried the lede. The film is close-up images of a woman masturbating, interspersed with images of natural scenery. It’s relating the female body to organic material that feels very Georgia O’Keeffe.
The unabashed nature of it connects to something that I was curious about. I want to preface this by saying this is a question about sex. If you’d rather not talk about that, just give me a sign and I’ll move on. But the fact that you recommended that film, combined with the sexual forthrightness of your movie, and then last year you made “Love Lies Bleeding,” which I thought of as a statement film and which had so much to do with queer eroticism — all these in conjunction made me wonder if there are things you’ve realized about sex that you’ve wanted to explore in your work recently. I love watching things that don’t feel performative, that feel inhabited and instinctive, instead of: Oh, I’m thinking about this from the outside. How does this look? That’s often how women have sex. You want to perform and display that you’re into it and good at it — maybe if you can perform that, then it can be true. There’s a slower, more undulating experience that can happen as you get older that I would like to start seeing in art. I think that my movie emulates the more pleasantly frustrating, longer experience of a success story, which is potentially also related to climax: You plateau into contentment after a lot of false victories and false starts, and then you achieve something that feels self-earned, even if accompanied. I’ve seen a lot of sex scenes that are titillating and exterior. I never again want to stand in a room and watch two people [expletive]. That’s our whole lives. It’s nice to get an odd angle of it.
Just hearing you talk, it’s clear your mind moves very quickly. There must be times when you need to slow down. Are there ways you do that? I do normal stuff. I cook soup and hang out with my family. I read.
I thought you were going to say “smoke weed.” I smoke a lot of weed. But I shouldn’t, because it [expletive] with my circadian rhythm and I can’t sleep.
You know, in the edition that I have of “The Chronology of Water,” there’s an interview with Lidia Yuknavitch, and in it she brings up the point that although we might find it uncomfortable to admit, the truth is that a lot of art has come out of drugs and alcohol. Have you ever been inspired by drug use or drinking? I definitely have had to self-soothe in different ways as I’ve gotten older. I’ve had social insecurities that within my particular profession have not been fun to navigate. But in terms of art making and thinking, I work best at 6 o’clock in the morning, completely clearheaded. I romanticize Bukowski sitting there with a big bottle of wine, writing his best poems. I do not have that. I text people I shouldn’t text when I do that. Earlier you were talking about abandon, how it’s fun to watch her in the movie fall down these holes in order to find something new. And sometimes you need to pour a bunch of vodka or kick your teeth down your throat. But I’m way too old for that. I don’t feel inspired when I get [expletive] up. I want my brain back. All of the things that I don’t want to know about myself? Don’t drink anymore. Make art about the things you don’t want to know about yourself. That’s how you meet your actual person inside.
What should we end on? Where do you want to leave people? What do we want to end on? If you want to know anything about me, if you want to have a continued conversation, you have to watch my movie first. It would be like a gift for anyone to actually spend two hours watching my film, because it would be like you wanted to hang out with me. So I don’t have anything else to say, unless you want to know my favorite color — but that’s also in my movie!
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, or Amazon Music
Director of photography (video): Aaron Katter
David Marchese is a writer and co-host of The Interview, a regular series featuring influential people across culture, politics, business, sports and beyond.
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